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

fig.io

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

#201

Post by mschrage »

tibbon wrote: post #195

This is pretty cool! I've only poked with it for a few minutes on a spare laptop I use for vetting software, but I did notice that the Kubernetes autocomplete only goes halfway, at least in iTerm. If I do `kubectl top` it doesn't recommend `kubectl top pods|resources` in the autocomplete. Autocomplete needs to work for the whole line, not just the first argument.

It looks like this is an issue with the completion spec for kubectl[0]! I'm not super familiar with k8s, so you wanted to help fix this (eg. writing the generator to list pods) that would be amazing! [0]https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete/blob/2a0eea63d04f6b2...

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

#202

Post by sidlls »

mschrage wrote: post #88
12ian34 wrote: 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…

We started with macOS because I have a background in Swift development. Linux is definitely not an after thought to us! As for the telemetry concerns, I totally get that. We've tried to strike a balance and it seems like we've got it wrong. This will be fixed in the next update.

The correct balance is 0% of terminal activity is sent with telemetry, unless the user explicitly and specifically authorizes it.

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

#203

Post by mschrage »

admissionsguy wrote: post #193

How did a startup with such an obvious idea get started in 2020? Was some API added to Mac recently that made it possible? Has the software market gotten large enough to support more niche products? Or just no one did it before? I find it positive, comforting even; it suggests that the space of viable startup ideas is really vast.

I honestly feel the same way. Once you use Fig, it feels like such an obvious idea. It didn't require new APIs or anything like that.

As far as I can tell, no one tried it because to 10x the existing shell experience requires working across multiple layers of stack. You need integrations with the shell, the terminal emulator and the OS -- in addition, to mapping the structure of a bunch of CLI tools.

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

#204

Post by sidlls »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #87
laurent123456 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telemetry being on by default on something like this is going to be hard to pull off. Homebrew has telemetry but it's only for Homebrew commands. This would potentially be for every single command one type in a terminal. It just takes one little bug in the app and who knows what can be sent, maybe passwords and so on.

> Homebrew has telemetry but it's only for Homebrew commands. It was also more than a little controversial.

And why I don't use the tool.

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

#205

Post by forgotpwd16 »

crazypython wrote: post #82

This is misleading. Fig's completions data files are open-source, but the completion engine that runs the completions is completely proprietary. That means you contribute free ("open source") completions to them, but the scope and type of the completions is limited by their proprietary engine. --- YC has pinned the founder comment and made it an impossible to reply to the top-level comment. They say the most effectiv…

>Well, this is an ad.

This isn't that eye-opening considering Launch HNs and job hires for YC-funded startups are said to be ads in FAQ.

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

#206

Post by krrrh »

brendanfalk wrote: post #73
yogevyuval wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you mean by even when in SSH or docker?

As in, if you SSH into a remote machine, Fig can offer completions for that remote machine. Same thing if you are running an interactive terminal for a docker container. This image may help clarify: https://fig.io/images/slideshow/screenshots/ssh.png

This seems like black magic, but it really does raise a lot of questions about the telemetry issue. It's one thing to potentially leak information from your own machine, but leaking data from remote servers you ssh into requires a whole 'nother level of assurity around privacy.

That said, it's pretty attractive because it's much harder to make a case to install fish on remote servers.

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

#207

Post by mschrage »

jlg23 wrote: post #188

I've been a unix user for more than 2 decades now and have seen many of projects like these. And I've dismissed all for the simple reason that they don't fix the problem at its roots: getopt et al should be instrumented to provide valid completions for all unix commands. A layer on top is destined to be out of sync with the actual implementations soon. We only get one more level of indirection, one more abstraction l…

Totally agree! The closer autocompletion lives to the source code, the better.

We've started off writing completions by hand, but to scale we will need more robust integrations. For instance, aws has 100+ subcommands and thousands of options.

Long term, we plan on writing integrations with popular CLI libraries, so that the completion spec can be generated automatically. We've already started with oclif[0] and have done some preliminary work with cobra.

[0 https://github.com/withfig/oclif-plugin/blob/main/src/comman...]

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

#208

Post by mschrage »

djrogers wrote: post #199

So I tried this with a throwaway address, disabled telemetry, and liked what I saw. Then noticed over the following few hours that text input everywhere other than iterm was very janky. Pauses, skipped letters, etc. Disabled fig and it cleared up... Just FYI in case anyone else runs into this.

Thanks for reporting this. This is definitely not the expected behavior. Would love to figure out what was going wrong.

matt [at] fig.io

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

#209

Post by michaelpb »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #181
mwcampbell wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. We know now that free doesn't really work.

>> it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. If it is worthwhile and not freely available, I will certainly pay. There are some great IDEs and tools that fit into this category. >> We know now that free doesn't really work. I suppose it depends on your needs, but I find using free tools such as zsh, vim, tmux, linux, and many others very valuable to me.

Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware.

Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60

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