Comment by homebrewer
1 month ago
With fish, if the program you're interested in hasn't betrayed the decades-old tradition of shipping man pages, it's often as simple as running `fish_update_completions`.
It parses all man pages on your system and generates completion files for you. By default, they go into ~/.cache/fish/generated_completions/*
If the man page was written poorly/is missing, you can always write your own completion (and hopefully send it upstream). fish uses such a simple format that I don't think there's any need for tutorials save the official doc:
https://fishshell.com/docs/current/completions.html
For example, here's an excerpt from curl
complete --command curl --short-option 'L' --long-option 'location' --description 'Follow redirects'
complete --command curl --short-option 'O' --long-option 'remote-name' --description 'Write output to file named as remote file'
When I screen share, people don't realize I'm not using zsh and dozen plugins. It's just fish and it's beautiful out of the box.
I'll switch to fish after it stops expanding `car TAB` to `blkdiscard` when I don't have `cargo` in path. Non-prefix completion for commands is plain evil.
I’ll switch to fish when it comes preinstalled on all of the computers I use so I can write scripts in it.
I already avoid bash scripting so I lose very little. Shell scripting beyond throwaway one-liners is a problem not a solution.
(Well that and all my machines come from the same NixOS configs.)
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Do you really limit your shell experience to plain POSIX? That sounds masochistic.
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That's why I use C to write all my shell scripts. Can't have something non-portable like bash, which is missing from 75% of computers by default.
(Seriously, what am I missing here? Is `apt-brew pacman install fish` really that hard to type? If cross-platform portability is actually a concern, shouldn't you be using Python anyway?)
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i'll just stick to bash
I bet this is configurable but I wanted to say that this is totally personal preference; I have the exact opposite opinion. Prefix only matching requires much more tab slapping in my experience.
I believe you would lose that bet. I look every few years and I don't see it
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Thank you for the comment. https://github.com/umlx5h/zsh-manpage-completion-generator appears to adapt this to ZSH. Have yet to try through
For those programs that have betrayed shipping man pages, instead say relying only on a --help system, do you happen to know if the fish shell has an analogue to Zsh `_gnu_generic` and Bash `complete -F _longopt`? If not, do you have any insight into why not/what it would take to make that happen?
At least for a subset of Python CLI programs, I wrote this: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/pycompgen
Still in an early stage, but it should work.
The OP mentions them in the last part of their comment, there is `complete …` commands for registering completions
It sounds like you don't know how the Bash/Zsh ideas I mentioned work. They run the command with --help, parse the output, and from that generate the completions, wiring them in to the completion system. That method is a zero config solution (well, you might need a list of such "command-names only" - no option names, which could change at any time -- so maybe "minimal config"). The OP & you mention a much heavier config solution which strikes me as against the vibe of Fish in general which is, supposedly, out-of-the-box niceness.
It's surprising that on OpenSUSE `zypper search fish-completion` returns more than 200 packages. Something is fishy here.
That is to get live data in your completions.
Say you have a widget that has 3 commands: list, start and stop.
With one of those completion files widget stop <tab> will show you a tab-able list of widgets which are running.
man pages are so underrated. I mean every project nowadays has README.md so I don’t see why we can’t just auto generate them with or without an LLM helping. Also I wish programs would use standardized generic arguments for help, config file, version, background the task, PID file, log file, and log level.
oh wow, it's parsing all 9461 man pages on my arch install, for a cute total of 13MB
thanks a lot
Fish isn’t the only shell that does this. Murex has supported man page completions for years too. And it’s fully automatic in Murex.
I tried to use fish on some of my debian servers that i only rarely update packages/kernel, so I don't have to carry my bashrc there, but found their completion for apt is pretty naive. for example after updated kernel i would want to clean up the old ones, but `apt purge linux-image-<TAB>` would list all available kernel versions, not just the ones currently installed.
in the end i switched back to bash.