Hello! I'm working with Siteshwar on these shell enhancements. At the cost of straying off-topic, I hope I can clarify our intent, and convince you that this is a worthwhile effort.
Ingo Schwarze wrote on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:57:29 +0100: > Do not bloat the shell. This is key to our philosophy. In fact, we started on this project as a reaction to what we perceive as bloat in shells like bash, whose man page is about half the length of the first Harry Potter novel. Our intent is to produce a shell with less internal complexity, and far less user-facing complexity, than popular shells. While we like the idea of man pages contributing to completions, we have not settled on an architecture for it yet. What if we described the feature as a separate script that scans installed man pages and outputs a shell completion file? Would that be able to slip by your Unix-philosophy-radar? > Do not bloat *any* utility program with unrelated bells and > whistles...Options typically > are a dash and one character. It sounds like you are reacting against the idea of shell command completions altogether. That ship sailed long ago: bash, tcsh, and zsh all know how to complete options, both long and short. A shell that hopes to succeed today cannot realistically omit this feature. > Whatever you do, it will be crude guesswork... How are you going to find out > whether you > are even looking at the right manual? We don't expect perfection, only an improvement on how shell completions work today, which requires users to install some monster static list of commands invariably designed only for GNU tools (and even then, special-cased for various Linux distributions). We're aware that scanning man pages is a sucky solution and will get a lot wrong; we just think that the current design sucks harder and gets more wrong. Our belief is that man pages, while imperfect, will nevertheless have much better fidelity to the installed system than whatever static list happens to be up at http://www.caliban.org/bash/ . As a longtime BSD contributor, I hope you can appreciate our attempt to make this existing feature more platform-agnostic. -Peter
