Enhance shell autocompletion with a cool new user interface and shell completion protocol

[anki-code]

Hello! Thank you for the new interesting project!

I just want to let you know about 🚀 Upterm — really great proof of concept but it stopped because maintainer was gone. This terminal looks like 21st century terminal. Very sad that it isn't supported.

[zadjii-msft]

This looks really cool, though this looks like something the shell would have to work with the terminal to achieve.

How was Upterm providing those autocomplete suggestions? Did they have their own shell they were using, or were they somehow pulling the auto-completions from bash/zsh/git somehow?

Presuming the shell provided a list of autocompletion suggestions to the terminal, drawing the UI shouldn't be that hard. Cmd would obviously never be able to support this, but powershell core sure could. I'd be curious what kind of perf there would be for something like that, with the shell emitting a list of auto-completion suggestions after some delay/on every character typed.

Doing the collapsible json thing might be quite a bit harder however :P that definitely seems like they had a custom rolled cat that worked directly with the terminal.

[huoyaoyuan]

I think you can get inspired by Visual Studio's C# Interactive and PowerShell ISE.
PowerShell already has a mechanism to collect completions, which is used by dotnet.exe.
And also, don't forget the great Language Server Protocol by Visual Studio.

[n3wt0n]

That would be really cool, or something like the iTerm 2 autocompletion on Mac. (cmd + ;)

This works for both files/folder and commands

[remkop]

@zadjii-msft

Cmd would obviously never be able to support this, but powershell core sure could.

Cmd could certainly achieve bash-like completion: clink enhances Cmd with tab completion, which users can customize with simple lua scripts.

While not as fancy looking as the screenshots above, it would be hugely valuable if Cmd would support this out of the box.

(More detail: see docs and pre-built completions for common tools.)

[zadjii-msft]

I don't disagree, projects like clink and yori are great and I love them. It's just that we really can't accept any changes to cmd.exe safely 😕 This doc covers some of the reasons why.

[remkop]

@zadjii-msft Thank you for the clarification. Makes sense and made me realize what a great job you and your team are doing. Keep it up! (Also thanks for pointing me to yori, I did not know about that project.)

[just1a-person]

Wish we had the Terminal of 2005:

[DHowett]

You know, apart from the "graphical" bit, this sounds like PowerShell. It accepts C# (procedural and object-oriented), you can write prompt plugins, you can stream files (and objects!), and it supports multiple hosting interfaces such as the PowerShell ISE (which is graphical!)

[just1a-person]

There is this new terminal called Warp: https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/status/1415343353164599299

I wish Windows Terminal was that radical and not just try to match existing Unix terminals' functionality (which it already has most of)

[orcmid]

There is this new terminal called Warp: https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/status/1415343353164599299

I wish Windows Terminal was that radical and not just try to match existing Unix terminals' functionality (which it already has most of)

I think there is a confusion of shell versus terminal and how apps are wired in. So Warp seems more integrated and purpose-built. All the questions about how one uses a terminal are about session shell use. They focus on CLI.

Since there was such a thing as stealth mode, one must presume this is to be a commercial offering. There is no hint that the code is even in the open (although there is a statement about working in public). "Stable" releases are also ratcheting pretty quickly according to the Discord. warp.dev has more. There's a nice presentation of How Warp Works. I have not found any statement about licensing or commercial use, although having forked Alacritty might be relevant, depending on how the permissive Apache License is dealt with.

[just1a-person]

I think the PowerShell team (or PSReadLine) and the Windows Terminal team can work together to make something like this happen.

[zadjii-msft]

1. Op, I should probably make a note about ctrl+space, since lots of folks already use that for MenuComplete. You may want to pick different keys
2. welp I forgot that Windows PowerShell (5.x) doesn't support `e as an escape character. I'll need to edit the sample to use the whole [char]0x1b thing for back-compat.
3. @christianparpart Oh don't you worry, I think I've got almost all the same thoughts as you in this space. Sometime over the next few months I wanna take what we have here, mostly throw it out, and propose a different version to terminal-wg¹. Shell-agnostic, client-agnostic, and terminal-agnostic.

Footnotes

1. terminal-wg is of course, mostly dead, but it is still a place to go. I'm not sure that consensus building is something that'll happen there. I still think there's room for it to be informative, but not normative. ↩

[sanket-bhalerao]

i still see the old prompt

maybe you forgot to restart wtp?

i have restarted the terminal several times, but still see the same result.

[zadjii-msft]

@sanket-bhalerao mind filing a new issue, with your settings.json file and your PowerShell profile? We can debug over there, and report findings back to this thread ☺️

[j4james]

But IIRC there were terminals that didn't parse DCS correctly.

@christianparpart The Windows 10 console is one such terminal. The issue was fixed years ago, but I don't think Windows 10 gets updates anymore. But it's not a problem as long as apps use some form of feature detection before using the sequence. I wouldn't recommend apps use any string sequence without feature detection.

The big diff probably is, that OSC's by habbit seem to always start with a number as identifier, for DCS there is no such grouping (as of yet).

The DCS intermediate-final characters are the equivalent of the OSC number. You can think of it as a self terminating base-16 number, so you have something like 65 times more range for a 4 byte value.

[sanket-bhalerao]

@sanket-bhalerao mind filing a new issue, with your settings.json file and your PowerShell profile? We can debug over there, and report findings back to this thread ☺️

@zadjii-msft I have raised a bug: #16053
UPDATE: I added incorrect configs at incorrect places. after @zadjii-msft pointed it out and I corrected the configs the feature is working as expected :)

[rsteube]

fyi Powershell supports colored completion using escape codes:

[jerkovicl]

@rsteube how did you configure this?

[rsteube]

@jerkovicl Windows Terminal according to the wiki, the completions are custom.
Shouldn't normally be an issue though, i'm using the powershell completions a bit differently.

[jerkovicl]

@rsteube yeah i have meant the color part and the command description

[rsteube]

I'm adding it to the ListItemText instead of the ToolTip.

using namespace System.Management.Automation
using namespace System.Management.Automation.Language
Function _git_completer {
    [System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.SuppressMessageAttribute("PSAvoidUsingInvokeExpression", "", Scope="Function", Target="*")]
    param($wordToComplete, $commandAst, $cursorPosition)
    $commandElements = $commandAst.CommandElements

    # double quoted value works but seems single quoted needs some fixing (e.g. "example 'acti" -> "example acti")
    $elems = @()
    foreach ($_ in $commandElements) {
      if ($_.Extent.StartOffset -gt $cursorPosition) {
          break
      }
      $t = $_.Extent.Text
      if ($_.Extent.EndOffset -gt $cursorPosition) {
          $t = $t.Substring(0, $_.Extent.Text.get_Length() - ($_.Extent.EndOffset - $cursorPosition))
      }

      if ($t.Substring(0,1) -eq "'"){
        $t = $t.Substring(1)
      }
      if ($t.get_Length() -gt 0 -and $t.Substring($t.get_Length()-1) -eq "'"){
        $t = $t.Substring(0,$t.get_Length()-1)
      }
      if ($t.get_Length() -eq 0){
        $t = '""'
      }
      $elems += $t.replace('`,', ',') # quick fix
    }

    $completions = @(
      if (!$wordToComplete) {
        carapace git powershell $($elems| ForEach-Object {$_}) '' | ConvertFrom-Json | ForEach-Object { [CompletionResult]::new($_.CompletionText, $_.ListItemText.replace('`e[', "`e["), [CompletionResultType]::ParameterValue, $_.ToolTip) }
      } else {
        carapace git powershell $($elems| ForEach-Object {$_}) | ConvertFrom-Json | ForEach-Object { [CompletionResult]::new($_.CompletionText, $_.ListItemText.replace('`e[', "`e["), [CompletionResultType]::ParameterValue, $_.ToolTip) }
      }
    )

    if ($completions.count -eq 0) {
      return "" # prevent default file completion
    }

    $completions
}
Register-ArgumentCompleter -Native -CommandName 'git' -ScriptBlock (Get-Item "Function:_git_completer").ScriptBlock

[jerkovicl]

@rsteube oh cool, thx for snippet:)

[rsteube]

It's on scoop and winget if you want to try it yourself.
Just add this to your profile and it should work:

# ~/.config/powershell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1
Set-PSReadLineOption -Colors @{ "Selection" = "`e[7m" }
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete
carapace _carapace | Out-String | Invoke-Expression

[jerkovicl]

@rsteube thx, i installed and set it all up, it works:)

[Jaykul]

Is there any way to have the completion menu support typing to narrow down the list?

[Tyriar]

FYI thanks to some contributions from @cpendery you can once again enable suggest in VS Code's terminal ("terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.suggestEnabled": true) starting from the next insiders build which should ship sometime in the next few days:

It's still rough around the edges and not close to feature complete, but I believe we fixed the show stopper bug that bricks the terminal 😅. Here's the issue tracking the feature microsoft/vscode#154662

[cereschen]

I have implemented the most basic fig like automatic completion, git.json is generated by the npm package @ withfig/autocomplete/build/git

import * as fig from '@withfig/autocomplete/build/git'
import { writeFileSync } from 'fs'
writeFileSync('./git.json',JSON.stringify(fig.default))

Note that I changed the shortcut key to ctrl+b

$directory = (Split-Path -Parent $PROFILE)
$jsonFilePath = Join-Path -Path $directory -ChildPath 'Completions/git.json'
$jsonContent = Get-Content -Raw -Path $jsonFilePath
$jsonObject = $jsonContent | ConvertFrom-Json
function Get-Items {
  param (
    $obj
  )
  $array = @()
  $mergedArray = $obj.subcommands + $obj.options
  $mergedArray | ForEach-Object {
    $name = $_.name
    $CompletionText = $_.name
    if ($_.name.GetType().BaseType.Name -eq "Array") {
      $name = $name -join "  "
      $CompletionText = $_.name[0]
    }
    $description = $_.description
    $newObject = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
      CompletionText = $CompletionText
      ListItemText   = $name + "   " + $description
      ResultType     = 2
      ToolTip        = $description
    }
    $array += $newObject
  }
  return $array
}
function Send-Completions {
  $commandLine = ""
  $cursorIndex = 0
  [Microsoft.PowerShell.PSConsoleReadLine]::GetBufferState([ref]$commandLine, [ref]$cursorIndex)
  $completionPrefix = $commandLine
  $result2 = "`e]633;Completions"
  # $result = "`e]633;Completions"
  if ($completionPrefix.Length -gt 0) {
    $completions = TabExpansion2 -inputScript $completionPrefix -cursorColumn $cursorIndex
    if ($null -ne $completions.CompletionMatches) {
      # $result += ";$($completions.ReplacementIndex);$($completions.ReplacementLength);$($cursorIndex);"
      # $result += $completions.CompletionMatches | ConvertTo-Json -Compress
      $result2 += ";$($completions.ReplacementIndex);$($completions.ReplacementLength);$($cursorIndex);"
      $subStr = $completionPrefix.Substring(0, $cursorIndex)
      $strArray = $subStr -split '\s+'
      $pushItem = $jsonObject.subcommands | Where-Object { $_.name -eq $strArray[1] }
      if ($null -ne $pushItem) {
        $res = Get-Items -obj $pushItem
        $result2 += $res | ConvertTo-Json -Compress
      }
      else {
        $res = Get-Items -obj $jsonObject
        $result2 += $res | ConvertTo-Json -Compress
      }
    }
  }
  # $result += "`a"
  $result2 += "`a"
  Write-Host -NoNewLine $result2
}

function Set-MappedKeyHandlers {
  # Terminal suggest - always on keybindings
  Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord 'Ctrl+b' -ScriptBlock {
    Send-Completions
  }
}

# Register key handlers if PSReadLine is available
if (Get-Module -Name PSReadLine) {
  Set-MappedKeyHandlers
}
else {
  Write-Host "PsReadline was disabled. Shell Completion was not enabled."
}

[rsteube]

@cereschen have a look at microsoft/inshellisense.
With microsoft/inshellisense#78 you can invoke the fig completions with inshellisense complete 'command args...'.
I've got a bridge for it at carapace-bridge as well which will be include in the next release of carapace-bin.

Things to note though:

Inshellisense uses a lexer to split the command which which is very basic.
E.g. at the moment it can't handle spaces, redirects, quotes, and so on.
The fig completions got quite a lot of issues as well.
So a lot of things don't work yet (and won't for quite a long time).

[cereschen]

@cereschen看看microsoft/inshellisense。 使用microsoft/inshellisense#78，您可以使用 调用无花果补全inshellisense complete 'command args...'。我在carapace-bridge 上也有一个桥，它将包含在下一版本的carapace-bin中。

但需要注意的事项：

Inshellisense 使用词法分析器来拆分命令，这是非常基本的。 例如，目前它无法处理空格、重定向、引号等。 无花果的完成也遇到了很多问题。 所以很多事情还不起作用（而且在很长一段时间内都不起作用）。

I successfully used is today, but it took me too much time to call is using Invoke Expression. Perhaps there is a better way, as I am not proficient in Powershell

This seems to be an issue with IS, as it will take some time for it to end..

[Welding-Torch]

I just started using Warp for WSL and it feels like it's lightyears ahead of this stuff. I think it would be great if Windows Terminal took some notes from it, especially on this feature request that's been open since 2019.

Also mentioned earlier in this thread by: @just1a-person in 2021 and @orcmid.