Universal Bash Completer

 

This is a first shot of bash completer which does a little more than 'normal' completers - and is pretty extensible.

Here a demo:

The indexing can be parametrized, to match only substrings or go into the structure only up to certain levels.

Universal? This is Python!?

Yes, currently you can point it to arbitray python modules and it will introspect and complete the names and arguments of classes and functions therein.
But: Completion and execution are two very distinct processes, i.e. the introspected python module could just be used as (a possibly autogenerated) adapter for any other command. Also, the indexing of the python module results in a tree of information, stored as json - you might generate it using other tools.

---

Tech

Bash Completion

There is lot of information how completion works in general, no need to repeat. man bash is the basis.

One important thing:

The Point of No Return

The current line can be changed by the completion results but not left of any of these characters:

• (and we fix that, see below)
• "
• '
• =

So anything before those characters can't be reverted by a clever completer if its wrongly entered.

In such situations out strategy is to rather display the docu and not further complete anything

Function Completion

The function completion options are straight forward, the completer actually helps here:

Say we have in our cmd module named 'mod':

def foo (): pass
def foo2(): pass

Then we simple exit with:

mod f<tab>     --> \nfoo\nfoo2\n
mod fo<tab>    --> \nfoo\nfoo2\n
mod foo<tab>   --> \nfoo\nfoo2\n

If substring matching is enabled we do also e.g.:

o<tab>   --> \nfoo\nfoo2\n

and the completer will do the rest, i.e shows you the options.

Arguments Completion

This is very much harder. The bash completion works sometimes against us here, e.g. when arranging options, and we have to trick it a bit.

(will explain the details, for now I need the tests only ;-) )