Don't autocomplete already supplied arguments

[nagisa]

There's two files in current working directory:

• [f] a.png
• [f] b.png

When writting command

rm [f\]\ a.png [f\]\ b.png

I can resort to autocompletions to write command faster.

So instead of writing whole name I can press [ and then →, however when writing second filename it again suggests [f]\ a.png, which is already to be removed. I have to resort to Tab then writing b and pressing Tab again which could be avoided if fish didn't autocomplete filenames that were already supplied.

EDIT: Same with

[ridiculousfish]

Seems reasonable,

[lilyball]

How would fish distinguish this from commands where passing the same argument multiple times actually has meaning? For example, passing the same file to different switches.

[nagisa]

A very good point indeed.

Switchless arguments

In roughly 90% of cases (no statistical proof, just a guess based on observations) it is intended to pass different arguments. Minority of use cases that require same argument several times would resort to using Tab+...+Tab completions.

Switches... It is much more complicated.

Man pages always (again, just observation, no proof) contains --switch=PSEUDO_VAR and/or --switch[=PSEUDO_VAR]. Currently generated completions doesn't keep track of the fact, that switch requires a value (or that it is optional). Fish could keep track of that and then autocomplete it using rules as shown below.

# Assuming that there's two files in current working directory. '[f] a.png' and '[f] b.png'
clang -o [_f\]\ a.png_
clang -o [_f\]\ a.png_ -o [_f\]\ b.png_

I couldn't find any command that would take multiple files for one switch, so I used clang with multiple outputs (it doesn't). Auto-completed part is denoted by _.

That's just a quick and dirty idea how to go around handling values for switches and I'm not sure if it would work.

So fish's --switch=value auto-complete behaviour could be same as it is now until someone proposes a really good solution.

[Shea690901]

@nagisa wrote:

I couldn't find any command that would take multiple files for one switch, so I used clang with multiple outputs (it doesn't). Auto-completed part is denoted by _.

clang -I <directory1> -I <directory2> ... While it's not a file match, it's essential the same issue 😉