Tips on Bash Completion
Posted on May 06, 2025 in Computer Science
Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.
Fish Shell is preferred to Bash/Zsh. The following content is for Bash/Zsh only.
It is suggested that you use the fish shell instead of the bash shell (for iteractive use cases) .
Installation
Ubuntu / Debian
wajig install bash-completion
macOS
brew install bash-completion
If you don't like or cannot install bash-completion, bash-it provies completion scripts for many popular tools.
Develop Bash Completion
Auto Generate Bash Completion Scripts
-
The cobra library in GoLang supports auto genrating shell (bash, fish, zsh and PowerShell) completion scripts.
-
The Python library argcomplete provides easy, extensible command line tab completion of arguments for your Python application. It makes two assumptions:
- You're using bash or zsh as your shell.
- You're using argparse to manage your command line arguments/options.
-
The Ruby library (and also command-line tool) completely lets you generate bash completion scripts from simple YAML configuration.