How to undo in ctrl-x mode?

Question

Let's say I just completed following path using Ctrl-x, Ctrl-f (twice) and I haven't exited the Ctrl-x mode yet and I got

/home/john.doe/

Let's say I chose john.doe accidentally and actually want to go back to /home to finally go to

/home/jane.doe/

Is there a way to undo the last e.g. Ctrl-f action without losing the whole path (i.e without losing /home here)?

To elaborate why I'm asking: If we exit with e.g. Ctrl-y and then use u, the whole path will be removed. So in theory one could exit after every completion, but that seems rather cumbersome.

Answer 1

I normally use i_CTRL-W and re-enter ^X-mode by i_CTRL-X i_CTRL-F. It does of course then exit the ^X-mode + if you do not have / as iskeyword, which would not be very user friendly, the approach require a few hits from time to time.

If it is something one do frequently enough one could do a remap. For example i_CTRL-G:

:inoremap <C-G>  <ESC>dT/a<BS><C-X><C-F><C-P>

It does:

• <ESC>: Exit insert mode
• dT/: Delete backwards until first /
• a: enter insert mode
• <BS> delete /
• <C-X><C-F>: Re-open ^X-mode file
• <C-P>: Move up one so that the selection is empty. This way we can hit CTRL-G multiple times without having to set it to no-selection.