Creating Cross-Shell Tab-Completions for Bash and Zsh
By
lihaoyi
Hot, fresh, and worth queueing round the block for.
Summary
The article discusses the challenges of implementing shell tab-completions for both Bash and Zsh, highlighting the differences in their APIs and the lack of descriptive completions in Bash. It provides insights into how developers can create cross-shell tab-completions with quality-of-life features.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledShell tab-completions can be very handy, but setting them up is complicated by the fact that half your users would be using Bash-on-Linux, while the other half will be using Zsh-on-OSX, each of which has different tab-completion APIs.
Most users exploring an unfamiliar CLI tool using tab completion appreciate showing a description along with each completion so they can read what it is, but that’s normally only available on Zsh and not on Bash.
With some work, you can make your tab-completions work on both shells, including nice quality-of-life features.
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