alt Hacker NewsWith 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'Replies
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.
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?
Thank you for the comment. https://github.com/umlx5h/zsh-manpage-completion-generator appears to adapt this to ZSH. Have yet to try through
It's surprising that on OpenSUSE `zypper search fish-completion` returns more than 200 packages. Something is fishy here.
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.
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.