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263 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4withfig
autocomplete
TypeScript2020–2025
withfig / autocomplete
autocomplete
IDE-style autocomplete for your existing terminal & shell
12Distinct people
23Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
25.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
IDE-style autocomplete for your existing terminal & shell
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I love this product, have contributed several times to it, and I'm a little torn. One thing I am thinking about now, is that the completion specs are MIT-licensed, and it…
rmorey used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year23 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-12-13 06:54:52 UTC to 2025-08-10 14:18:31 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesMSmschrage·Dec 15, 2021
> In our timeline, maybe some file format could be standardized that describes the particular inputs and options a command takes, and e.g. shells would hook into it. Kind of like header files, but distributed either in a community repository or by each of the tools themselves.
This sort of sounds like what we're working on at Fig. We've defined a declarative standard for specifying the inputs to a CLI tool and have a community repo with all supported tools: https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
Disclosure: I'm one of the founders
In The growth of command line options, 1979-Present (2020)If you want to play around with writing more 'interesting' completions, check out Fig (https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete).
You can write completions declaratively and use TypeScript to generate dynamic suggestions.
Disclosure: I'm one of the founders.
In ZSH Completions How To◧ Fig | https://fig.io | ONSITE (San Francisco) // REMOTE (US timezones) | Full-time
Fig makes engineers and their teams more productive in the terminal.
- Mission: re-imagine the terminal. First, autocomplete (https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete), then fully-fledged App Store with apps like these (https://fig.io/blog/post/launching-fig)
- Why: 50M+ engineers use the terminal. It has barely changed since the 70s.
- Investors: Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, founders/execs of Stripe, GitHub, Heroku
- Traction: One of the largest Hacker News launches of all time; our users love us: twitter.com/fig
We are looking for people who are excited about reimagining the terminal/shell/CLI. We have plenty of open roles:
* Systems Engineer (Rust/C/C++): https://fig.io/jobs/systems
* Full-Stack Engineer (Typescript): https://fig.io/
Read the rest
jobs/full-stack-typescript
* Support Engineer (Bash/Shell/CLI): https://fig.io/jobs/support-engineer
Please apply or message brendan AT fig DOT io, we are very responsive!
◧ Fig | https://fig.io | ONSITE (San Francisco) // REMOTE (US timezones) | Full-time
Fig makes engineers and their teams more productive in the terminal.
- Mission: re-imagine the terminal. First, autocomplete (https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete), then fully-fledged App Store with apps like these (https://withfig.com/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4)
- Why: 50M+ engineers use the terminal. It has barely changed since the 70s.
- Investors: Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, founders/execs of Stripe, GitHub, Heroku
- Traction: One of the largest Hacker News launches of all time; our users love us: twitter.com/fig
We are looking for people who are excited about reimagining the terminal/shell/CLI. We have plenty of open roles:
* Systems Engineer (Rust/C/C++): https://fig.io/jobs/systems
* Full-Stack Engineer (Typescript): https:/
Read the rest
/fig.io/jobs/full-stack-typescript
* Support Engineer (Bash/Shell/CLI): https://fig.io/jobs/support-engineer
Please apply or message brendan AT fig DOT io, we are very responsive!
Co-founder of Fig (https://fig.io) here.
I'm pleased that there is more innovation in the terminal emulator space. For a tool used by just about every developer, not a ton has changed since the launch of the VT100 [1] in the 70s.
Fig adds autocomplete [2] to your existing terminal. Soon, we're launching the ability for you to build your own visual apps and shortcuts (like these: https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4) and share them with your team or the community.
Rather than building our own terminal, we integrate with the terminals you already use (even the one embedded in your IDE). This means everyone on a team can collaborate but keep using their existing terminal and shell setup.
We are excited to integrate Fig with Warp.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100
[2] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
In Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal (waiting list)It looks like this is an issue with the completion spec for kubectl[0]! I'm not super familiar with k8s, so you wanted to help fix this (eg. writing the generator to list pods) that would be amazing! <3
[0]https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete/blob/2a0eea63d04f6b2...
In Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the TerminalLaunch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal
Hi HN! We’re Matt and Brendan, co-founders of Fig (https://fig.io/hn). Fig adds VSCode-style autocomplete to your existing terminal.
We built Fig because of our own struggles in the terminal: we were tired of context switching between man pages, Stack Overflow posts, and Medium tutorials anytime we got stuck. We wanted our CLI tools to be more discoverable.
The terminal is powerful, but unforgiving. It emulates the constraints of hardware (like teletype printers and video terminals) that became obsolete a generation ago. There are no built-in affordances. No hints about the 'right way' of using a tool or even finding the right tool for the job. Beginners are thrown in the deep end. And even seasoned developers can screw up their system with a few unfortunate keystrokes.
To solve this, we add a UI overlay that is linked with the interactiv
Read the rest
e shell. As you type, Fig pops up subcommands, options, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal. For example, you can type `npm run` and Fig will show you the scripts available in your package.json. You could also type `cd` when SSH'd into a remote machine and Fig will list the folders within your current directory on the remote machine.
We use the Accessibility API on Mac to insert text on your behalf and read what you've typed. We also integrate with the shell to determine the current process and working directory. We are built natively for macOS in swift. We built our UI using web technologies so we can ultimately go cross platform. We render it using a WKWebView (not Electron).
Fig is free for individuals and always will be. All completion specs - the templates used for generating CLI suggestions - are open source and anyone can contribute [0]. We plan to monetize by supporting autocomplete for companies' custom scripts and internal CLI tools. Ultimately, we want to bring other process documentation (like SRE runbooks or deployment workflows) closer to the environment where it's used. You can see an early iteration of Fig in this HN thread from last July. [1]
Fig is designed to be private. All processing happens locally on your device. None of your keystrokes are ever transmitted or stored by Fig.
We'd love to hear your feedback on what we’ve built! We're still in private beta (so things may break!!), but we are letting HN users skip our waitlist today and tomorrow using the link above! :)
----Edit----
We really appreciate all of this feedback! Brendan and I want to address some of the most common concerns below:
Telemetry:
Fig has basic telemetry in order to help us make product decisions. We currently give the you option to opt out of all non-essential telemetry by running `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true`. This removes everything except for one daily ping. We use this ping to help us understand how many people were using Fig.
Adding this ping was a mistake. We have already removed it and will be pushing this change in our next build (v1.0.43).
Business Model:
Under the hood, we've built an API layer on top of the terminal. This API lets you create visual apps. Autocomplete is the first app we've built using this API. We have many more planned for things like interactive runbooks for SREs and automating deployment workflows. You can see some early prototypes here. [2] We plan to monetize these team-based apps by charging per-seat.
Autocomplete will always be free for individuals. We will never sell your data.
[0] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980
[2] https://withfig.com/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4
The TS/JS analogy is perfect. This is exactly the approach we took with Fig.
We defined a declarative standard that lets you describe the structure of any CLI tool. Fig then uses these to provide VSCode-style autocomplete in the terminal!
Currently specs are manually contributed by the community, but we are planning to integrate with CLI libraries (cobra, commander, click, etc) so they can be generated automatically!
You can see some examples here: https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
In CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line (2020)Fig (withfig.com) | San Francisco or REMOTE | Senior full-stack engineer to join Founding team | Full time
Fig is re-imagining the terminal for the 21st Century. We are starting by building VSCode style autocomplete. In the future, we plan to expand into a fully fledged Terminal app store. We graduated from YC S20 and have raised significant funding (ask us who).
We are looking for two senior engineers with the following experience to join the founding team :
1. Full-stack + Systems + Shell (bash/zsh)
2. Full-stack + Shell (bash/zsh) + Interested in owning our autocomplete product (https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete)
Here's more information about Fig, our team, and what we're looking for: https://withfig.com/hiring
Alternatively, feel free to email brendan at withfig.com
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2021)