You can write your bash scripts to do this, too.
These auto-completions are dependent on having the corresponding completions information installed and enabled. Which it is with most modern distros, but more bare-bones setups won’t have it.
I have two Linux VMs, one Fedora, the other Arch. I’m guessing tab autocompletes are built into those as well?
In case of Arch, for
bash, you have thebash-completionspackage, apart from which some program packages install their own bash completions.
Then there is alsozsh-completionsforzsh.I remember having to install them separately, but maybe you know some package group that did it for you.
Arch has the packages, but it won’t be installed by default.
oh yeah, arch is for nerds who wanna customize everything themselves. i’m new to arch so i forget sometimes
Anyone who is learning new stuff in this thread should really try fish, it makes using the command line so much nicer.
Finally, a command line shell for the 90s
😄
I started out with bash, then eventually realized that I was using zsh because I’m a macbro. I’m a little slow :(
zsh is fine until you want to write a script and realise the difference in resources available online. Most people assume bash for shell scripting so that’s what you’ll need to use too.
To be fair, they only switched to zsh in 2019, so a lot of tutorials probably still assume bash
for a while, i was so clueless that i didn’t even know i was using a zsh terminal. i thought i was in bash because i watched linux tutorials on youtube
Just tried it, working is indeed nicer after some nice fresh tuna and Sushi.
Fish is such a nice shell.
I wrote a collection of small apps for fish a few weeks ago. If anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/matdombrock/angler.fish
https://github.com/microsoft/inshellisense if you have to stay with Bash :)
go with elvish, it’s new, sleek, and it even has functions that return functions, which means my plan to weaponize the english language by turning every word in a lower case punctuation free sentence into a series of shell commands is almost complete, MUAHAHAHAHA
EDIT: For legal reasons, this comment is just a shitpost, and I don’t know how to code. I’m just a lazy vibe coder.
interesting, didn’t know that… Will try!
Finding out about “Ctrl-r” also was a gamechanger.
What does CTRL+R do?
Lets you easily and interactively search your command history.
Half the stuff I do is usually preceded by that, it’s really useful!Adding fzf to the mix makes Ctrl+r even better.
Yeah standard bash Ctrl+r is just so painful. I much rather use “history | grep searchtearm” than that awfull search. fzf is a whole other level. But nowadays I just use fish shell which IMO has even better search than fzf
Just wait until you discover fish/zsh autosuggestions.
As annoying as using a non-posix compatible shell sometimes is, fish saves me so much time
I have been suggested alternative programs to install to work with
Ctrl+r, which are supposed to work better, but I just end up usingkwrite ~/.bash_historywhenCtrl+rfails.
I accidentally stumbled across Ctrl+r over a decade ago and I still don’t understand properly how it works. So I usually egrep -e someInsaneRegex ~/.bash_history
The part of the tech stack that handles all these command editing and navigation shortcuts is the readline library. Check out
man readline. There’s an entire section on searching. readline is used for lots of other interpreters, too.That is worth it for more complicated things like, “I want all commands that started with git and contained ‘foo’”
Did it like that before, but Ctrl-r is typically just a lot faster.
Ctrl+r is cool, but atuin is oh my gosh great
isn’t that just fzf with ctrl-R binding
I used fzf before atuin, and it works pretty similar, but atuin has a few additional features, as it tracks more information than the normal shell history. For example, you can also search only for commands that you executed in the current directory (great for stuff that is project specific). Or, if you use the history syncing feature, you can toggle search for commands you executed on either any or only the current machine.
I didn’t know fzf yet. Neat
dude holy shit that is AWESOME! i had something similar, but it was a custom function.
srch() { cat ~/.bash_history | grep -Ein “$@”}
Did you know that grep can take the name of the file(s) you want it to search as the final arguments?
For example:
grep -Ein "$@" ~/.bash_historyi always pipe into grep so sometimes i forget that’s even an option, lol
Man, fish has me spoiled
The spirit of the 1990s is alive and well!
i need to get familiar with fish. syntax is super basic compared to zsh/bash. those two have so many fucking
{\\/\^/\asdf$$(dog)}
-h
ls -SlutYou called?
Whenever someone says they don’t really like terminal because they don’t like to type or remember commands. This is what I think “they didn’t use auto complete”.
Auto complete works for file names and paths by default, but the development can write it to only complete certain extensions. Like auto complete for image program only completes image files. Then you have completion for commands, subcommands and flags.
Auto complete is done through calling a bash script with currently typed line, and the bash script can call other commands. So developer can write a really complicated auto complete and make it available as a binary if they want, and just use that in bash. Or you can use many tools that will generate auto complete script for you based on your commandline args.
If you write your own scripts/cli binaries I recommend learning how to write auto complete for it. Makes it incredibly easy to use the tools.
i was in the dark for so long because i thought tab autocompletions only worked with file paths. i can’t believe that whole time i didn’t even accidentally hit tab once on a command
I guess it can go unnoticed, I use Arch so maybe that’s why I got more involved. I remember searching why auto completion didn’t work, then finding out I need to install bash-completions package. After knowing that it makes one curious about how it works. Then the next stage is writing it for my own programs because it obviously won’t come with bash-completions package.
I once wrote a shell (terminal) to watch anime, and I wrote auto completion for different commands on it, it was really nice to just type
playthen prefix and then tab for auto completion on anime names, and even for episodes I wrote auto completion give me last episode I watched + 1.
I’d like something like on Cisco equipment.
Tab completes a command
? prints possible options with brief descriptions, filtered by starting letters if you already typed anything
if there is just one option left, you can just use it directly, so you can write shortened commands (similar to ip commands on Linux)That would be the dream indeed. It’s so fluid after you learn it. Other networking equipment often has good configuration CLIs as well (like juniper and vyos), but Cisco is probably the best in my experience. It’s also nice how consistent they are across generations.
You can get about as close as it’s possible in a normal operating system with zsh and plugins like zsh-autocomplete. Bash tries to pick up the possible alternatives from context as well (with tab suggestions) that act somewhat like
?on Cisco CLI, but implementing it is left up to the command itself to provide for the shell. Many commands luckily provide very robust autocompletion to bash out-of-the-box, especially if installed via the system package manager.Unfortunately we’ll probably never reach the point of actual configuration CLIs since they only have a set amount of commands that are developed by the same company. It would be close to impossible to achieve the same level of standardisation for a general operating system, as we don’t know the entire configuration of the system and there are multiple incompatible flag schemes. (As styles go, things like dd and ffmpeg throw a wrench in the works with their non-standard flags)
Incredibly stupid, but should work
My favorite
Look at Carapace for even better completions
i got carapace installed with homebrew. looks pretty sweet! i’ll be making use of the tab button a lot more now
For a moment I thought that ‘commandName -’ was some PowerShell stuff.
Powershell does that too
It can’t hurt to know this but to me PS is not intuitive, looks like SomeLongString-ActingLikeA-Command, and I avoid it as much as using Windows in the first place, unless absolutely necessary.
Been a Linux user since 2018 and I’ve never know this, wtf
It depends on the shell you’re using, if it’s enabled and if you have completions for that particular command installed. For bash you might have to install a bash-completion package, depending on your Linux distro. Zsh is similar but had more powerful and user friendly completion options. Fish is even better and comes with completion for a lot of standard commands pre-installed.
2018? i was 2017. that was the year i went to a coding bootcamp, so they had us all on macs. I know y’all despise mac users with a passion, but we learned how to use the bash terminal. I didn’t know
cdwas a bash exclusive thing until recently. Most of the time I use zsh, and I’d always type cd when actually you can just type the path of the directory and hit entercdis not bash exclusive, it’s the standard POSIX way to change directories. Zsh is the outlier here, being more use friendly than most shells.i got used to bash back in 2017 when i went to a bootcamp. but i’m a mac user so i mostly do zsh. you’re not gonna believe how long i went until i discovered that you can cd into a directory just by typing the directory
it was a week ago
I’d rather a Mac than a Windows box. At least you get a proper shell (zsh or bash - zsh is the default now I think), python installed by default, can install package managers (macports, brew), can get coreutils, etc and most FOSS software from the Linux world runs since macs are UNIX at heart.
I’m pretty sure
cdisn’t even coreutils but implemented by shells as a wrapper forchdir/fchdirwhich is part of the kernel. Which has always bugged me since you can’t reliably pipe or redirect tocdsince shells do things differently; it doesn’t handlestdinor the last component of a command runs in a subshell so doesn’t affect your current shell, blah blah.i fucking love wrappers, i wanna be the best wrapper alive. my schizo theory is that we’re in a simulation and the entire english language is just wrappers for insanely nested ruby function calls
There want auto complete when I started.
Why not just install tealdeer tho??
implying i know what the fuck a teal deer is
Oi mate you just go down to the williams and get some paint and go frolicing in the forest. Then bam tealdeer
A TLDR alternative to man pages
While a man page is for every possible flag available for a command,
A tldr is for the most common tasks a command can do.tldr fcfc Open the most recent command for editing and then run it. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-fc. - Open the last command in the default system editor and run it after editing: fc - Specify an editor to open with: fc -e 'emacs' - List recent commands from history: fc -l - List recent commands in reverse order: fc -l -r - Edit and run a command from history: fc number - Edit commands in a given interval and run them: fc '416' '420' - Display help: fc --help
I never install that. I like they behavior of my prompt just like it is.
i tweak the fuck out of my prompt my dude, i’m all about that
echo $PROMPT | sed "s/\{|\}|/ /g"Oh sure but when I hit tab I want it to complete my programs name or path. When I double tab I want options for either of those.
