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Comment by ufo

4 years ago

The shell ought to be able to help with that. There's no need to remember if it's --conf or --config if you can press --conf<tab>.

One of the things I like about Fish is that by default it can tab-complete program options and also shows a one-line description of what each of them does. (It grabs that info from the man page).

8 comments

ufo

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foxfluff  4 years ago

I just tried fish. xinput --set-[TAB] and nothing. Apparently it doesn't understand the standard long-option format that is supported by xinput and documented in the man page. You have to know to omit the dashes and then it'll complete. And it's downhill from there.

Yeah I used to have all kinds of simple as well as supposedly sophisticated completion setups with zsh years ago but I've given up on it since then. It's always half-assed and half the time causes more problems than it solves. Same with bash. There are some places where I must resist the urge to try complete a filename because the shell starts trying to figure out which target it can complete from a Makefile in a large build system and just freezes. The only practical way out is to interrupt and type the command again or wait a stupidly long time. There are other issues like completion trying to be smart and filtering out things it thinks you don't want to complete. Nothing is more frustrating than a shell refusing to complete a filename that you know is there.

  • throw10920  4 years ago

    I run fish. I was able to get long-option completion for gcc, polybar, firefox, man, emacs, xrandr, and fish itself. The only command I was not able to get long-option completion for was xinput. You just picked a bad program to try.

ori_b  4 years ago

So much of computing is dedicated to solving problems that could be omitted.

  • salawat  4 years ago

    Seriously. Just get up from the computer and go do something else. /s

    We computer people are truly an odd bunch.