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authorDaniel Mueller <deso@posteo.net>2020-04-04 15:15:10 -0700
committerDaniel Mueller <deso@posteo.net>2020-04-04 15:15:10 -0700
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Add support for generating a bash completion script
This change adds support for generating a bash completion script. If sourced, the shell will provide tab completions for the program's arguments. There are two possible approaches provided by clap for going about generating shell completion functionality: either at build time, by separately generating the clap parsers out-of-band, or at run time, as an option to the main program itself. We are generally not too much in favor of a run time approach, as it means less inspectability at installation time and more overhead in the form of code crammed into the main binary. Hence, with this change we take the "build time" approach. Clap recommends hooking the generation up in build.rs, but this seems like an inflexible choice. For one, that is because it would mean unconditionally generating this file or using some user-unfriendly environment variable based approach for making the process conditional. But there is also the fact that specifying the command for which to generate the script should likely be configurable. That is a limitation of the completion script that clap generates (see https://github.com/clap-rs/clap/issues/1764). In our version we provide a utility program that emits the completion script to standard output, accepting regular command line options itself. In doing so we allow for installation time generation of the completion script or installation of the utility itself, the output of which could be sourced on demand -- depending on the user's preference.
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@@ -112,6 +112,20 @@ It is recommended that the resulting executable be installed in a
directory accessible via the `PATH` environment variable.
+#### Bash Completion
+**nitrocli** comes with Bash completion support for options and
+arguments to them. A completion script can be generated via the
+`shell-complete` utility program and then only needs to be sourced to
+make the current shell provide context-sensitive tab completion support.
+```bash
+$ cargo run --bin=shell-complete > nitrocli.bash
+$ source nitrocli.bash
+```
+
+The generated completion script can be installed system-wide as usual
+and sourced through Bash initialization files, such as `~/.bashrc`.
+
+
Known Problems
--------------