Autocomplete as an Interface (2015)

In fairness Bash can do that as well. It's not a shell specific thing, autocompletion is just a shell script after all, the issue is whether someone has written those scripts (which they have for Bash) and if your package manager ships them (which some do but others do not).

However I do agree that Bash generally feels outdated these days. In fact autocompletion was the primary reason behind me writing my own readline API

IPython dev here,

Thanks to you (and the author) for being happy users of IPython; but if you don't have complaints you are not using it enough :-) We do our best to provide good completion; but most of the work is thanks to Jedi (Dave Halter) for the completion and prompt_toolkit (Jonathan Slenders) for the UI , at least in terminal.

There is a lot of improvement that could be done to completion (time and funding missing), and we are always looking for Feedback and Pull Requests.

Side Note while I agree about the statement about Julia and bar(foo) vs foo.bar(); nothing prevent the completer to add text not at the cursor position. Having foo) suggesting to prepend `bar(` is a possibility.

(also hijacking top comment...)

> Instead, for most people the killer feature of zsh is that it doesn’t re-output the prompt when you autocomplete

Actually, this, coupled with the "complete on first tab hit" is the reason I stayed away from zsh. I tried it a few times, simply because so many people are raving about how much better it is than bash, but never really switched and the autocomplete is one of the major reasons.

1. I like to see autocomplete as a history. I hit tab (twice, but I will get to that in a second) and see what my options are. I type another letter or a few and hit tab again. If I made a mistake, I can catch it by comparing the previous set of choices to the new one. With zsh, if I made a typo, all I get is an empty list and a sense of confusion.

2. Every once in a while (more often than I a willing to admit), I will hit tab for completion when I don't really mean to. Like I will type something like ls -l /usr/local/bin/. Bash will beep at me to ask if I am really sure. Zsh will freeze and compile a list of hundreds of completions. Not much else to say about that.

Autocomplete is the first step. Then you get linting, static analysis, autoformat on save, and code snippets. All built into your fancy IDE with plugins. You are super productive, you learn from its suggestions that you can quickly flip through, and your coworkers are happy that they only have to check your code for correctness and implementation, not style and edge cases.

But they're customisable, if you can be bothered. I have set up a few as is, and some defaults are really handy too!

For example, `err.nn` expands to ``` if err != nil {

} ```

And that's a default for GoLand. I have set up a few custom ones that are pretty handy as well, which frees up time from typing, to actually thinking through and solving problems, as well as making any necessary verbosity easier to deal with.

While most variable names are kept short, I do go for 2-3 word variables when necessary, and have some pretty long winded function names that, IMO, improve readability by a mile, like `GetNonEmptySliceElements()`.