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Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

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Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#121

When it required me to enter my "work email" to "connect with teammates" before I could use it, I dragged it to the trash.

You are clearly not the ideal customer profile.. my guess is that the Fig team are going after corporate developers who won’t be as concerned about privacy so much as they are concerned about convenience and productivity.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#122

I find autocomplete for commands to be, sometimes, a little dangerous. I'd at least turn it off when root or sudo.... PowerShell does a good job with autocomplete on commands and options --if you're using PowerShell of course. Fortunately, it's cross platform. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/window...

For 'dangerous' commands, Fig requires you to press enter twice - once to select suggestion and insert it into the terminal and then again to execute it!

Well, that's a good idea!

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#123
post #80

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux woul…

Point #4 is particularly salient since it seems like telemetry information for a CLI-based tool which monitors the user's keystrokes doesn't provide the user any advantages.

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#125
post #27

This is cool! Is there a plan to support the completion APIs over LSP so existing tools can implement support independently? For example if I could write a language client for various language servers just for the completion apis, it would go a long way. I'm surprised it requires nodejs on the client to run - how do you lock node versions so it doesn't break on updates, or needs to run in the same dev environment as…

Fig already works inside of VSCode and VSCode Insiders! Also to clarify: we don't require node.js on the client. The completion specs are interpreted by the Fig macOS app. re: LSP. Super cool idea, are you imagining Fig autocomplete in language-specific repls? Or something else?

Exactly that. LSP is great because its the only semi-standard API for integrating with different programming tools, and completions are one of the built in features. Snippet support too - I can't tell how many times I've needed to write a for loop in a REPL, which would be much easier with snippets in a terminal.

Does the VSCode implementation run on Linux?

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#126
post #124

I have just one question: will this work over ssh? So when I run this on my Mac to do a git commit via ssh on a server, will autocompletion work?

Yes it will!

See this example: https://fig.io/images/slideshow/screenshots/ssh.png

It should work out of the box, but you may have some issues if you have multiple SSH connections to the same remote machine or if your remote machine uses an async prompt (like powerlevel10k).

If you have any issues, feel free to email me and I'll help get you set up brendan AT fig DOT io

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something we definitely should add as a fallback when a Fig completion spec doesn't exist! The reason we created our own standard is because traditional shell autocomplete doesn't always provide metadata, like descriptions, priority or icons. Also it is a little tricky to write by hand, unless you're pretty familiar with shell scripting.

Many CLI libraries provide the ability to generate auto-completion scripts. Cobra for Golang is an excellent example. It provides functions for all the major shells and is quite simple to add to any Go CLI using the library. It also supports dynamic calls for when someone wants to autocomplete on a resource known only to the running CLI. For python argparse, there is argcomplete in the same vein

We're building out integrations with CLI libraries like cobra and oclif[0], so you can generate a Fig completion spec automatically the same way!

Then it just comes down to the Fig popover UX.

[0] https://github.com/withfig/oclif-plugin

Re: Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal

#128
post #80

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux woul…

You can stop at #1. Why do I need this when oh-my-zsh exists?

which oh-my-zsh plugins do you use that can do this? Is there an all-encompassing one or do you need to download tons of different ones like a docker plugin, git plugin, etc
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