Sorry for the somewhat awkward title. I just couldn't resist the geeky pun, and couldn't come up with a better phrase to express it. Hope you got the short message from the title. Also please forgive the awful (or awesome?) prose below. I've always wanted to write a post like this :)
Having been a happy Linux user for the past year-and-a-half, I respect the art of command line-fu. The most useful, yet simple, trick in the bag of the CLI ninja is, of course, the all-powerful Tab key. In one stroke - literally - it can help him type even the longest of commands with minimal key presses. I just love going
Now I'm so used to it, I expect it to be present everywhere - my browser, my text editor, in git commands, in the python interactive interpreter. Basically, I expect my computer to do its job - that is, helping me out while I try to do mine. That does not happen easily, however. So I set out on a quest - to try to have some form of Tab-completion in as many programs as possible. Below, I chronicle my journey, for the benefit of the traveller seeking the same end :-
The Switch from Bash to Zsh:
All Linuxes come with the same default shell: bash. However, there's another shell out there - zsh - which is little known, but extremely powerful. It's the first step from CLI apprentice to CLI productivity master. There are some excellent plugins available for zsh which add tab completion for many commands like
If you're thinking to try out zsh, I'd recommend installing Oh My Zsh! first thing after you install zsh itself. It'll make it much easier to set up zsh to your liking, replete with themes, plugins, and aliases. Also, as it turns out, the
The Text Editor:
Since I'm a die-hard Emacs user, this section's a bit biased. For Emacs, I use Auto Complete Mode. It's fairly easy to setup, and blazing fast once you get used to it. Note that this is not code completion, it's simple, cross-buffer word completion, so it'll suggest words based on what's in the rest of the buffer, or in other open buffers. I find this better than code completion for the simple reason that code completion would require me to install separate plugins for each language I use, while on the other hand, word completion is universally effective, if not as accurate. Heck, it even works in comments. Combine that with YASnippet, and you'll find yourself with one finger on the Tab key nearly perpetually, and code flowing from your fingers.
Oh, and let's not forget ido-mode. It's the coolest, dead-simplest Emacs plugin ever.
For Vim users who feel left out, a quick Google search yields this.
The Interactive Interpreters (Python and Ruby):
I hated it when I fired up
Coming to
The Browser:
Not much to say here. Probably the only thing you can Tab-complete in a browser is URLs, which the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome already do, anyway (it's not true, CLI-style tab-completion; just passable). If you want word completion too and you're on a recent version of Firefox, use this addon. Or, if you're using an older Firefox version, you could try this one.
Here ended my quest. Let your chronicles and criticisms be outlined in the comments below.
Having been a happy Linux user for the past year-and-a-half, I respect the art of command line-fu. The most useful, yet simple, trick in the bag of the CLI ninja is, of course, the all-powerful Tab key. In one stroke - literally - it can help him type even the longest of commands with minimal key presses. I just love going
..<Tab>..<Tab>..<Tab><Enter> on my terminal, commands flowing at the speed of thought.Now I'm so used to it, I expect it to be present everywhere - my browser, my text editor, in git commands, in the python interactive interpreter. Basically, I expect my computer to do its job - that is, helping me out while I try to do mine. That does not happen easily, however. So I set out on a quest - to try to have some form of Tab-completion in as many programs as possible. Below, I chronicle my journey, for the benefit of the traveller seeking the same end :-
The Switch from Bash to Zsh:
All Linuxes come with the same default shell: bash. However, there's another shell out there - zsh - which is little known, but extremely powerful. It's the first step from CLI apprentice to CLI productivity master. There are some excellent plugins available for zsh which add tab completion for many commands like
git, pip, gem, and kill along with some bonuses. It'll also help you out with many other small things, like ignoring case and correcting spelling mistakes.If you're thinking to try out zsh, I'd recommend installing Oh My Zsh! first thing after you install zsh itself. It'll make it much easier to set up zsh to your liking, replete with themes, plugins, and aliases. Also, as it turns out, the
$RPS1 environment variable, along with the git support in Oh My Zsh!, pretty much renders my alternative (and very useful) bash prompt obsolete.The Text Editor:
Since I'm a die-hard Emacs user, this section's a bit biased. For Emacs, I use Auto Complete Mode. It's fairly easy to setup, and blazing fast once you get used to it. Note that this is not code completion, it's simple, cross-buffer word completion, so it'll suggest words based on what's in the rest of the buffer, or in other open buffers. I find this better than code completion for the simple reason that code completion would require me to install separate plugins for each language I use, while on the other hand, word completion is universally effective, if not as accurate. Heck, it even works in comments. Combine that with YASnippet, and you'll find yourself with one finger on the Tab key nearly perpetually, and code flowing from your fingers.
Oh, and let's not forget ido-mode. It's the coolest, dead-simplest Emacs plugin ever.
For Vim users who feel left out, a quick Google search yields this.
The Interactive Interpreters (Python and Ruby):
I hated it when I fired up
python the first time and it didn't offer Tab-completion. I later understood that since whitespace is significant in Python, completion is not enabled by default in the interpreter (or the Python REPL, in purist-speak). I figured spaces could be used for indentation just as easily as tabs, so I enabled completion using this .pythonrc. It's not like I miss tabs for indentation now.Coming to
irb (the Ruby interpreter), you can have Tab-completion and syntax highlighting in it using the wirble gem and a .irbrc. Pretty straight forward, supremely effective, no down-sides.The Browser:
Not much to say here. Probably the only thing you can Tab-complete in a browser is URLs, which the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome already do, anyway (it's not true, CLI-style tab-completion; just passable). If you want word completion too and you're on a recent version of Firefox, use this addon. Or, if you're using an older Firefox version, you could try this one.
Here ended my quest. Let your chronicles and criticisms be outlined in the comments below.
