argcomplete

You raise a good point about solvable completion, and one that I agree with. However, automatic completion support doesn't have to cover every use case. It only needs to be good enough. Complex applications can fall back to providing their own completion scripts. One point I'm not clear on is why you think such a scheme wouldn't be feasible for a large number of commands. Completion wouldn't be invoked until the fist argument (the command's name) is complete just like how bash doesn't scan the system's completion directory until it knows what command is being invoked. And as for completion for the command's arguments, the command is only ran once to generate the list of completion candidates. Note that there are projects that already do exactly this like [1] . [1]:https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete

> (when DDging the only result I can find on the topic is your comment) You weren't kidding at all. After spending more time than I'd care to admit searching for the library, I couldn't find traces of it anywhere on google, ddg, or bing. I relented and digged whatever information I could find in my history. Revisiting these projects, it's painfully obvious that I have jumbled a few projects together. Sincere apologies for the unintended goose chase. This project [1] is the one that introduced the `--_completion` flag. It registers itself as a default completion function, but blindly and dangerously tries to run any command it gets with this flag. (This project is completely de-indexed from search engines and I'm not sure why). Like [1], project [2] registers itself as a default completion function, but checks the first 1024 bytes for the

The Python "argcomplete" module[1] generates shell completions for any program that uses argparse, so it's certainly doable. [1] https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete

I should write up a comparison between: - Cement (http://builtoncement.com) - Cliff (http://cliff.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) - Plumbum (http://plumbum.readthedocs.org) - Argh (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/argh/0.24.1) - Aaargh (https://github.com/wbolster/aaargh) - Baker (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Baker/) So many more to choose from. Now we get to evaluate Click. Seems like the reason Armin wrote Click was to load options dynamically, but that's what Cliff does via stevedore (https://github.com/dreamhost/stevedore). My favorite feature about Cliff though is: http://cliff.readthedocs.org/en/latest/complete.html which comes out of the box, but then again, there's Argcomplete (https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete). EDIT: Updating from previous posters - Naked (http://naked-py.com) - Docopt (http://docopt.org) - Clint (https://github.co

Tangentially related: Shell tab completion for Python programs using argparse: https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete