Quickly exclude several types of candidates

[DamienCassou]

Quickly exclude several types of candidates

[oantolin]

I don't think you can do better than your second attempt if you limit yourself to matching styles and style dispatchers. Those mechanisms only give you a single regexp per component of the input string and what you really want is to turn = into two negative literals. There is however a different mechanism that allows you to produce as many components as you wish: the orderless-component-separator.

So you can abandon your dispatchers and instead set orderless-component-separator to a function that replaces an = with as many negative literals as you need. Here's a simple example that only checks for = at the beginning of the list of components, and relies on the default style dispatcher to kick in later and deal with the !s:

(defun my-whacky-separator (string)
  (let ((components (split-string string " +" t)))
    (if (equal (car components) "=")
        (cons '("!-tests.js" "!.spec.component.js")
              (cdr components))
      components)))

(setq orderless-component-separator #'my-whacky-separator)

Let me know if there's still any issue left to address with that solution.

[oantolin]

Of course you could also store the text !-tests.js !spec.component.js in a text register or bind = to a keyboard macro that types that text for you.

[DamienCassou]

A text register is just perfect. Thanks for the reminder :-).