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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

#281
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…

Can you suggest some tools which auto suggest like Fig and work with zsh? The built in auto complete in zsh works nicely, but how do I get the drop down of all options?

Fish does that by default

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

#282
I am a big fan of Fig. Some of my favourite specs are `docker` and `git`. No longer do I need to list containers or commits before performing an action, the autocomplete provides all of these values for me.

I'm excited to see more command-line tools provide metadata about commands close to the source code. Our CLI at Fastly provides JSON output in the help command, so it was really easy to generate a Fig spec automatically: https://github.com/kailan/figly

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

#283
post #24

I don't really understand what's so different from the ZSH completions which I already have in my terminal but with no data leaving my machine?

Traditional shell completions are quite difficult to make. Many CLI tools have completions for subcommands and options, but not for arguments. Only the big CLI tools like `git` and `docker` have arguments completions (e.g. git push [remote] [branch]`. Fig's declarative schema makes building the completions for subcommands, options and arguments very easy. This means we can support much more powerful autocomplete for…

> Fig's standard format

How is that a standard when you just came up with it? Any other existing autocompletion format is more standard than whatever you just released.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional shell completions are quite difficult to make. Many CLI tools have completions for subcommands and options, but not for arguments. Only the big CLI tools like `git` and `docker` have arguments completions (e.g. git push [remote] [branch]`. Fig's declarative schema makes building the completions for subcommands, options and arguments very easy. This means we can support much more powerful autocomplete for…

> Fig's standard format How is that a standard when you just came up with it? Any other existing autocompletion format is more standard than whatever you just released.

Yep I mistyped. Meant to say standard "suggestion" format. Trying to imply that each suggestion conforms to a specific standard that we have set but that lets you customise things like the text it suggests, what is inserted, icon etc

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason we suggest logging in with your work email is so that you can share shortcuts and completions for internal CLI tools with your team. I guess I'm still missing something, as I don't get why the domain of my email address is relevant for who I share things with? My (hopefully constructive!) feedback is that by asking specifically for a business mail, you send certain signals to the end user. Are you honest…

No worries. We determine who is on your 'team' based on email domain excluding webmail domains, like gmail.com and hey.com. If there are a bunch of people at the same company using Fig, we'd probably reach out to understand what you find valuable and how we could make it better - we don't have a paid offering yet, but want to figure out what teams are willing to pay for!

Ah, then it finally clicks. I really think you need to make this a lot clearer though. As others have already pointed out, if you're going to require this information, I think you need to ask for it up-front - don't ask for it at the end of the installer.

Something else I would add is that there are almost 300,000 people "in my team" using my business email domain (yep, it's a big company). I think better wording here would be "organization", rather than "team". But...

...I'm personally pretty unsure about this whole-company team/organization thing overall - for example, I work at a consultancy/outsourcer, and we can't just share whatever we want beteen divisions or teams. You've raised a lot of money (congrats :), and at some point you and your investors are going to want to make some money; so you can either charge individuals (which you've ruled out), or charge companies. Assuming the latter, and assuming you're going after larger companies with a lot of devs/sysadmins, I think your approach/presentation needs to be better tailored to that audience. If you're set on this "team" approach, I personally think it would be better to have it more like Slack (and many others), where someone has "ownership" rights for the team, and can manage its membership.

Thinking some more, I'm guessing your plan is something like: get as many individual devs/sysadmins on board for free, so they want it at work. If that's right, you need 2 better approaches/presentations: let individuals get it without barriers (like asking for business email...), and have a clearly separate paid plan.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I have a background in Swift development. Then why on earth did you go out of the way to implement this in JavaScript instead?

The current implementation of Fig is a native macOS app (Swift/ObjC) that exposes an API to access terminal specific information - edit buffer, working directory, current process, etc. On every platform we support, we'll implement this natively.

As Fig grows, we want to enable an ecosystem of UI extensions for the terminal that are built to go cross platform. Using web technology here made sense since we can leverage built-in webviews for rendering or bundle a lightweight implementation like Tauri[0].

[1]

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

#287
I detest that it has become normalized to grant tech companies access to personal data with only limp promises that it won't be misused.

If you give Fig permissions to look at what you are typing into the terminal, you should be prepared for them to look at what you are typing into the terminal and use it how it best serves them. They're asking for more permissions than that of course.

Imagine giving FedEx a copy of your house keys "just so they can guarantee safe delivery" without any legal recourse if the delivery people decided to help themselves to the contents of your fridge, or make photocopies of your documents.

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

#288
post #11

Absolutely stunning - I've often wondered myself about why the terminal doesn't behave like this already, it just makes sense . My only worry would be this is obviously so great it's only a matter of time before Apple/Microsoft see the light and build something similar into their OS - however hopefully this happens via acquisition rather than what happened to Flux, Watson and Duet.

Why does this comment not seem legit... This seems like a bot. There is no way Apple or Microsoft would pick this up.

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

#290
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are totally different things. This is like asking why you need a computer at home when you already get the newspaper delivered every morning.

It's the other way around. Why buy this newspaper when I already have a computer?

Ok, sure. The analogy is silly anyway, but silly arguments beget silly analogies.
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