Hacker News Reader

Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering this for years. It seems like the most obvious way to greatly improve CLIs, yet no one seems to talk about it...

View on HN

Check out Fish Shell.

Zsh can also do this.

But it needs plugins, fish has it builtin. Nothing to configure

Yup this. If I wanted to carry around a bag of plugins all day, I'd just use bash.

On the plus side, by picking and choosing what you want, you can get the precise performance and usability ratio that fits you best. Fish is a great shell but nothing beats the zsh plugin ecosystem.

Or in my case: spend a bunch of time messing with and tweaking my shell config. Sometimes the tyranny of default options is helpful to getting things done.

I’ve tried fish shell a few times and ended up preferring ZSH.

To my understanding Fish shell doesn’t have complete BASH compatibility and it breaks many scripts.

It also doesn’t seem to have nearly as wide of an adoption as ZSH so less overall community support in genera.

Sure you can just specify the interpreter with hash bang but it’s something worth noting before considering a switch.

This. Just please don't be so dogmatic, Fish, it's ok to also allow && together with AND and not break my scripts ...

Bash itself breaks compatibility with POSIX sh. You can supply --posix, but you can also just use bash -c from fish.

Do you mean it just ships with support for a list of preset commands, or can it provide autocomplete for any command? (I have no idea how that could possibly work, mind)

The latter, to an extent; it parses man pages to provide completion/help for commands

Sure, but configuration is more powerful. I the shell a lot, I’m not going to choose a suboptimal solution for my use case just because of a little bit of configuration.

Gosh TOPS-20 had this back in the early 1980s (and this is why bash has readline...)

Yet there's no standard way for system and user programs to expose their parameters and help to the command line, like most TOPS-20 programs did. So bash's completion and help facilities pale in comparison.

Indeed Don, why don't you extend gnu getopt to generate a special ELF section with an argument grammar and then modify bash to load this section? Shouldn't take too long and then this feature would become automatic!

Accessibility demands Tourette Syndrome Compatible noise word support.

I am sure that can be controlled by $LOCALE

PowerShell has this; all cmdlet parameters are parsed by the PowerShell environment, so you don't have to write argument parsing code over and over; parameters to cmdlets are a standard form with many using the same common names where it makes sense.

Because of that design they are long and readable words but tab completable, and ctrl-space will bring up a menu of available matches starting with what you've typed so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com