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Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

carapace.sh

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Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#21

Post by Symmetry »

DeathArrow wrote: post #11
arpowers wrote: post #10

Reminds of of Project Hail Mary. Never heard the word "carapace" before that book...

In Romanian "carapace" means shell. It seems to mean the same in English, too, but I presume is seldom used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carapace

It's the biggest solid piece of shell in English. Like the stuff over a crabs pincers is still shell but only the stuff that surrounds the main body is the carapace. Often used as an analogy for other sorts of armor, like a knights breastplate being his carapace or a tank's hull armor.

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#22

Post by myrmidon »

madmountaingoat wrote: post #20
drcongo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not uncommon in English, though I suspect it's most often used in technical fields like entomology.

I'm pretty sure you encounter in in science fiction as well, where some bug like alien has a carapace or a soldier has some armored exo-skeleton described by the word. Though I cannot think of any specific examples.

Quite common in videogames, too.

A specific example would be the Carapace (armor) upgrades in Starcraft 2 (one faction, the Zerg, are basically insects).

Also sometimes used for (humanoid) armor crafted from shells (fantasy settings).

I think this is MUCH more prevalent in scifi/fantasy targeted at male audiences, and the data confirms it [1]

[1]: https://osf.io/g4xrt/#!

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#23

Post by sevagh »

myrmidon wrote: post #22
madmountaingoat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you encounter in in science fiction as well, where some bug like alien has a carapace or a soldier has some armored exo-skeleton described by the word. Though I cannot think of any specific examples.

Quite common in videogames, too. A specific example would be the Carapace (armor) upgrades in Starcraft 2 (one faction, the Zerg, are basically insects). Also sometimes used for (humanoid) armor crafted from shells (fantasy settings). I think this is MUCH more prevalent in scifi/fantasy targeted at male audiences, and the data confirms it [1] [1]: https://osf.io/g4xrt/# !

The Dota 2 hero Nyx Assassin (beetle-like creature) has a skill called Spiked Carapace.

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#24

Post by Per_Bothner »

Completion for program P should be written and maintained by the "owner" of program P - and installed with program P. This is of course difficult when there are many different "shells" that each have their own "language" for specifying completions. A multi-shell completion library can help with this problem.

To me it make sense that completion for program P should be handled by program P itself. That way, completions are unlikely to get out of sync with the application, and the completion handler can use the same option parser as the application. A way to do this is to use a special "hidden" switch to request completion.

Specifically the DomTerm terminal emulator (https://domterm.org) handles its own completions. Bash allows you to register a command that handles completions for some other command. The following tells bash that to handle completions for the domterm command it should call domterm with the magic "#complete-for-bash" option followed by the existing line and position.

    complete -o nospace -C 'domterm "#complete-for-bash" "$COMP_LINE" "$COMP_POINT"' domterm
When domterm is run with "#complete-for-bash" as the first argument (chosen to avoids accidental use) it processes the remaining arguments, and prints out the completion suggestions to bash.

I don't know how to do something similar for other shells; suggestions welcome. Some other shells (such as Fish) include help text as part of the suggested completions. Handling that would require a more complex protocol. Perhaps one that returs a result in JSON format?

If a such a protocol were standardized (perhaps invoked by a "#completions-as-json" option?), we just need to solve a final piece of the puzzle: How does a shell know if a command understands the "#completions-as-json" option? My suggestion is that we define a new keyword-value pair in the "desktop" file specification; the shell would search for a P.desktop file,

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#25

Post by bongobingo1 »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #6
bPspGiJT8Y wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much faster than zsh script completions I'm curious where did you get that from. Edit: I read the note in your dotfiles repo. Yes calling `compinit` on each shell invocation is going to be really slow. That's not how you're supposed to do it, you could at least add the `-C` flag to cache the completions. Ideally you'd also use `zcompile` to compile the cache to ZSH word code. This puts my completions initializing t…

I have had this snippet in my .zshrc for years, autoload -U compinit && compinit { # Compile the completion dump to increase startup speed. Run in background. zcompdump="${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zcompdump" if [[ -s "$zcompdump" && (! -s "${zcompdump}.zwc" || "$zcompdump" -nt "${zcompdump}.zwc") ]]; then # if zcompdump file exists, and we don't have a compiled version or the # dump file is newer than the compiled file zcomp…

Unable to edit, but this is how I handled lazy loading the completions

    {
      # load compinit and rebind ^I (tab) to expand-or-complete, then compile
      # completions as bytecode if needed.
      lazyload-compinit() {
        autoload -Uz compinit
        # compinit will automatically cache completions to ~/.zcompdump
        compinit
        bindkey "^I" expand-or-complete
        {
          zcompdump="${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zcompdump"
          # if zcompdump file exists, and we don't have a compiled version or the
          # dump file is newer than the compiled file, update the bytecode.
          if [[ -s "$zcompdump" && (! -s "${zcompdump}.zwc" || "$zcompdump" -nt "${zcompdump}.zwc") ]]; then
            zcompile "$zcompdump"
          fi
        } &!
        # pretend we called this directly, instead of the lazy loader
        zle expand-or-complete
      }
      # mark the function as a zle widget
      zle -N lazyload-compinit
      bindkey "^I" lazyload-compinit
    }

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#26

Post by bongobingo1 »

nikolatt wrote: post #9
bongobingo1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had this snippet in my .zshrc for years, autoload -U compinit && compinit { # Compile the completion dump to increase startup speed. Run in background. zcompdump="${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zcompdump" if [[ -s "$zcompdump" && (! -s "${zcompdump}.zwc" || "$zcompdump" -nt "${zcompdump}.zwc") ]]; then # if zcompdump file exists, and we don't have a compiled version or the # dump file is newer than the compiled file zcomp…

I just want to say - thank you! I've been using ZSH since it became the default on macOS and one thing that started annoying me recently is the slow startup time. Your snippet tangibly improved that. Do you by chance have any good resources on optimising my config further?

You may be interested in this lazy completion loader https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40140873

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#27

Post by bPspGiJT8Y »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #6
bPspGiJT8Y wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much faster than zsh script completions I'm curious where did you get that from. Edit: I read the note in your dotfiles repo. Yes calling `compinit` on each shell invocation is going to be really slow. That's not how you're supposed to do it, you could at least add the `-C` flag to cache the completions. Ideally you'd also use `zcompile` to compile the cache to ZSH word code. This puts my completions initializing t…

I have had this snippet in my .zshrc for years, autoload -U compinit && compinit { # Compile the completion dump to increase startup speed. Run in background. zcompdump="${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zcompdump" if [[ -s "$zcompdump" && (! -s "${zcompdump}.zwc" || "$zcompdump" -nt "${zcompdump}.zwc") ]]; then # if zcompdump file exists, and we don't have a compiled version or the # dump file is newer than the compiled file zcomp…

> BTW I believe `-C` will disable some cache checking, caching is enabled by default

You're right, my memory has let me down.

> Do you have any pointers for the "load on tab" idea? I didn't turn up any good results in DDG and LLMs were just hallucinating.

The simplest implementation would be something like

    bindkey ^I init_completions

    init_completions () {
      # ... init logic here ...

      # rebind tab to complete
      bindkey ^I complete-word
      # actually do complete the initial request
      zle complete-word
    }
Edit: I see now you already figured it out, yeah that's exactly what I meant

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#28

Post by bPspGiJT8Y »

logicprog wrote: post #18

I tried to use this to get better completions with nushell, but it just doesn't have the breadth and depth of completions that fish has as of yet, nor does it have automatic completion generation from manages (although it does have a tool for that) so I eventually gave up and just made fish itself my nushell's completion engine. However I'll be keeping my eye on it, because it's a really cool idea to have a shared co…

> so I eventually gave up and just made fish itself my nushell's completion engine

That's an interesting idea. Do you have a link to show how you did this?

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#29

Post by logicprog »

bPspGiJT8Y wrote: post #28
logicprog wrote: post #18

I tried to use this to get better completions with nushell, but it just doesn't have the breadth and depth of completions that fish has as of yet, nor does it have automatic completion generation from manages (although it does have a tool for that) so I eventually gave up and just made fish itself my nushell's completion engine. However I'll be keeping my eye on it, because it's a really cool idea to have a shared co…

> so I eventually gave up and just made fish itself my nushell's completion engine That's an interesting idea. Do you have a link to show how you did this?

Yeah! It's an officially supported thing with nushell, here are the docs: https://www.nushell.sh/cookbook/external_completers.html#fis...

The completions don't work sometimes (for instance you don't get completion for some commands when running them with sudo) and it doesn't fall back on providing file completions if it doesn't know what other completions to provide, which is a bit annoying, but it generally works and I'm sure there are ways to fix that too.

Re: Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary

#30

Post by Aachen »

arpowers wrote: post #10

Reminds of of Project Hail Mary. Never heard the word "carapace" before that book...

I suspected Brandon Sanderson made it up for his Mistborn series until hearing it in Project Hail Mary also. This is actually why I clicked the thread: was curious if anyone would make the reference!
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