I'd like to be able to simply type herb and then press tab and have fish-shell tab-complete it to herbstclient. I've tried looking it up, but every result I can find has to do with overiding fish's autocomplete with tab rather than ctrl + f.
Do I need to create a fish script for this? If so, what should it look like and where should I put it?
Assuming that is a command you want an abbreviation: abbr herb herbstclient. Although you don't use [tab] to complete an abbreviation; you have to press [space] or [enter]. Note that the expansion can consist of multiple tokens. For example, this is one of my most often used abbreviations: abbr -a -g -- gcm 'git checkout master'. Also, abbreviations only get expanded in the command position; i.e., start of line or after a pipe, |, or semicolon. If you want that expansion elsewhere in a command line there are ways to achieve that but it's a bit more complicated.
Related
I am working on porting Google Cloud SDK command line auto completion feature to fish shell. When I have an unambiguous reply with multiple arguments:
A) Either the command is completed with all those arguments BUT spaces gets escaped (\ ) when I specify the function call in the complete command inside ''s or ""s, like: > complete ... -a '(__fun)'
B) or if I don't do that (just: -a (__fun)), then only the first argument of the reply gets into the completion and all the other arguments "get lost"
Is it possible to reply with multiple arguments at once in fish completion?
Could be done in a number of ways. You will have to hack it a bit, though, since as ridiculous_fish says it's not designed for this.
Easiest would be to ship your own wrapper function that can take the escaped output and pass it on in a way that works. Not very pretty, though, and would screw with autosuggestions unless you also go back and modify the history lines.
Here's something semi-hacky/semi-elegant I would propose:
If you have looked up a "sequence" of args you'd want to complete at once, at first invocation put the trailing args as the description to the first one. Once that one has been locked in, remove all other options but the first in this "description queue", keep going through it and it will simply be a matter of quickly pressing tab-tab-tab-tab.
Completions don't have to be perfect, they're mostly a lil help on the way until you have enough history lines that autosuggestions take over, imo.
I wish to create a custom command which has it's first argument as a regex & pressing TAB after typing regex will open a auto-complete menu with all the files matching the pattern.
if I name my command vimf (meaning vim find) and write the auto-complete function like:
#compdef vimf
_arguments "1: :_files -g \"**/*.conf\""\
In the above auto-complete function, typing $vimf , lists all the files ending with .conf in the auto-completion menu. Now, I want this part .conf to be taken from the first argument of the command. So, if I type something like: vimf *.pp, I want it to search only files ending with *.pp.
How do I make that possible? How can I use the arguments of a command while writing auto-complete functions?
To do this you need to use the words array which is set to the content of the command line.
From this, you retrieve the file type by accessing the good index, and troncate the prefix. (this is done by #compdef vimf)
Here is the result:
#compdef vimf
_arguments "1: :_files -g \"**/*.${words[2]##*.}\""\
&& return 0
I tried it on my terminal, it works, but of course can take long time to perform if your do this by the root. Enjoy :)
(Crossposted to unix.stackexchange.com)
This question and the answer teach us how to introduce colour into tcsh prompts.
This webpage explains nicely how to get colour into any output of the echo command:
> echo \\e[1\;30mBLACK\\e[0m
BLACK
> echo '\e[1;30mBLACK\e[0m'
BLACK
The word 'BLACK' in the example above is printed with a black (or darkgrey) foreground colour (depending on the overall color scheme).
Now I'd like to introduce this into the [TAB] command autocompletion feature of tcsh. I tried:
complete testcmd 'p/*/`echo '"'"'\e[1;30mf834fef\e[0m'"'"'`/'
And I get:
> testcmd [TAB]
> testcmd ^[\[1\;30mf834fef^[\[0m
Obviously the characters lose their special meaning. Hopefully I just did not get the escaping right. But I tried several other ways. So any help is appreciated.
The real use case is that I've got a command completion that offers three different types of completions and I'd like to visually distinguish the types. Also the alternatives are computed by an external command. That is why I need the completion to use the backticks with an external command, such as echo. I don't care about the details of this command. If you make it work in any way with the tcsh's complete command I'll probably be able to adapt (thinking perl -pe wrappers and such).
The reason why I believe this has to work somehow is that the tcsh itself offers coloured command completion if you e.g. type ls [TAB]. That works correctly in my setup. Also you can use ls -1F inside the autocompletion and the colours that ls outputs are also piped through. An example would be:
complete testcmd 'p/*/`ls -1F`/'
Update: As user mavin points out, the colourization of ls in this example is indeed not piped through. The colours of ls are lost, but the auto completion can reapply colours according to LS_COLOURS variable based on hints such as the / and * marker endings as added by the ls. This can be verified by doing
complete testcmd 'p/*/`ls --color -1`/'
which fails to provide colour, and only provides garbled output. (Literally pipes through the escape character sequences)
I'm on tcsh version 6.13.00
Any ideas? Pointers?
In your example, complete testcmd 'p/*/ls -1F/', the colours aren't getting passed through from ls. You'll find that you get colour here even if you set ls to produce monochrome output, but not if you leave off the -F. What's happening is that tcsh is doing its own colouring based on the symbols added to the end of each filename by ls -F. For example:
complete testcmd 'p%*%`echo dir/ symlink# device# socket=`%'
You could exploit this in your completion generator, e.g.,
complete testcmd 'p/*/`echo foo bar | perl -lane '"'"'print join " ", map { $_. "%" } #F'"'"'`/'
The snag is that you end up with these symbols in your completed command-line, and will have to manually backspace each time.
tcsh will colour filenames based on their suffix, dependent on the $LS_COLORS environment variable (e.g., show all *.gz files in red). You could pre-calculate the list of potential completions, place them all in $LS_COLORS, then set up dummy files for the completion to use. If you use the precmd alias, you can have the completions automatically recalculated every time the prompt is shown.
complete testcmd "p#*#F:$HOME/.cache/testcmd-completions#"
alias prep-testcmd "setenv LS_COLORS '*red=01;31:*green=01;32:' && rm -r ~/.cache/testcmd-completions && mkdir -p ~/.cache/testcmd-completions && touch ~/.cache/testcmd-completions/red ~/.cache/testcmd-completions/green"
alias precmd prep-testcmd
Aside: it'd be nice to use this with a ``-style completion rather than an F-style completion; that way you wouldn't need to create the dummy files. However, I tried that in tcsh 6.17 and it didn't work.
In vimtutor Lesson 2.1: DELETION COMMANDS, there is a note after the #4 item:
The letter d will appear on the last line of the screen as you type it. Vim is waiting for you to type w. If you see another character than d you typed something wrong; press <ESC> and start over.
However, I do not see intermediate commands in the last line as the note says. How do I enable this? What option should I set in my .vimrc?
You can use
:set showcmd
That will display the commands as you type it in Vim.
The same can also be put into .vimrc
This 'last line' is the line at bottom of screen.
If you don't see this you may have trouble with (Linux?) terminal setting.
If you use terminal on Linux system, try to invoke command export TERM=Linux before running Vim.
In Matlab, there is a very nice feature that I like. Suppose I typed the command very-long-command and then a few several commands afterwards. Then later if I need the long command again, I just type very and press the up arrow key, my long command appears. It finds the last command that starts with very. I couldn't do the same in unix command line, when I try to do it, it disregards whatever I typed, and goes back to the last commands in chronological order. Is there a way to do it?
In bash this functionality is provided by the commands history-search-forward and history-search-backward, which by default are not bound to any keys (see here). If you run
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'
it will make up-arrow and down-arrow search backward and forward through the history for the string of characters between the start of the current line and the point. See also this related Stack Overflow question.
In bash, hitting ctrl-r will let you do a history search:
$ echo 'something very long'
something very long
$ # blah
$ # many commands later...
(reverse-i-search)`ec': echo 'something very long'
In the above snippet, I hit ctrl-r on the next line after # many commands later..., and then typed ec which brought me back to the echo command. At that point hitting Enter will execute the command.
You can do the same thing by using "!". For example:
$ echo "Hello"
Hello
$ !echo
echo "Hello"
Hello
However, it is generally a bad idea to do this sort of thing (what if the last command did something destructive?). If you expect you will reuse something, then I suggest you create a shell script and save it away somewhere (whenever I plan to reuse something, I create a script in ~/.local/bin).