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0 pointsMacha3y ago0 comments

Also if you look at interactive shells, which have the lower bar to people trying them out (as seen by fish, nushell, etc. picking up users in recent years), powershell is actually quite clunky as an interactive shell. It doesn't appear to have completions matching those shells, the command names are quite tedious for those that don't have built in unix-y aliases, it doesn't provide a facility for common shell shortcuts like "run this one command with a modified environment", etc.

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juki3y ago

> It doesn't appear to have completions matching those shells

What kind of completions do you mean? PowerShell has completion for commands, parameter names and arguments. You can define arbitrary script blocks to do custom completion (or for simple cases just use `ValidateSet`). They can be defined either in the script/function itself, or separately with `Register-ArgumentCompleter` (that also works for non-PowerShell programs).

MachaOP3y ago

In fish, if I type ls -<tab>, I get a history based autocomplete suggestion (ls -l), and also a summary of options with brief descriptions:

    ls -l
    -1                                           (List one entry per line)
    -A  --almost-all                         (Show hidden except . and ..)
    -a  --all                                                (Show hidden)
    -B  --ignore-backups                      (Ignore files ending with ~)
    …and 51 more rows

I can use the arrow keys to cycle into the "and more rows section, or type further to narrow the list. zsh supports similar.

In Powershell, if I type Get-ChildItem -<tab>

It just cycles through options apparently abitrarily. The first suggestion is "-Path", and it offers no facility to provide explanatory information.

juki3y ago

If you use `Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete` it will show the options and the types of the arguments, but yeah, I don't think there is a completion function available that orders them based on history or shows the docstrings.

In principle there isn't anything that would stop one from making that. PowerShell has history info available, and help messages/docstrings can be given for parameters (`Get-Help command -full` will show them if available).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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juki3y ago

> It doesn't appear to have completions matching those shells

MachaOP3y ago

In fish, if I type ls -<tab>, I get a history based autocomplete suggestion (ls -l), and also a summary of options with brief descriptions:

    ls -l
    -1                                           (List one entry per line)
    -A  --almost-all                         (Show hidden except . and ..)
    -a  --all                                                (Show hidden)
    -B  --ignore-backups                      (Ignore files ending with ~)
    …and 51 more rows

I can use the arrow keys to cycle into the "and more rows section, or type further to narrow the list. zsh supports similar.

In Powershell, if I type Get-ChildItem -<tab>

It just cycles through options apparently abitrarily. The first suggestion is "-Path", and it offers no facility to provide explanatory information.

juki3y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse