Is a semi-mature autocompletion available in “bzr shell”?

Asked by Zearin

PRELIMINARY NOTE (Some quick background info about me) :

I'm relatively new to version control. Briefly tried SVN for personal projects, and found that I hated network requirements and file locks with the fire of a thousand suns. Bazaar's flexibility was intimidating at first (with so many different workflows, which should I use?), but I'm finally starting to warm up to it and use it for personal projects.

I use the “bzr shell” exclusively. (See http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/#shell .)

It's a great feature, saving me lots of time by not having to type “bzr” in front of every command. If I understand correctly, it even performs better under the hood, too.

My only gripe with it is having to type out entire paths. No autocompletion for commands is a little annoying too—but most commands are relatively short, and paths (or URLs) are potentially quite long.

I checked the Bazaar plugins page and found the plugin “bzr-bash-completion”:
 • http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrPlugins#head-940d5aa6c18307feeed618d45353359ce94a7145 (BzrPlugins page listing it)
 • http://pi.physik.uni-bonn.de/~ta/bzr-completion/ (branch containing the plugin)

However, it contains no instructions on how to use it, or even whether it works as simply as most other plugins (branch a plugin into ~/.bazaar/plugins/). And the README says it's “crude” and “incomplete”.

While “incomplete” is less than ideal, I can't seem to find a way to get ANY autocompletion inside “bzr shell”. :(

Is there a way to achieve autocompletion inside “bzr shell”?
If not, is there any work being done on this?

Thanks.

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Martin Pool
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Martin Pool (mbp) said :
#1

Hi,

bzr bash completion is not relevant at all to bzr shell, only to the bash shell.

For me, the current version of bzr shell (from https://launchpad.net/bzrtools) does seem to have working autocompletion: if I start it with 'bzr shell' and type 'ls <tab>' then I get a list of possible options and filenames. I'm testing on Ubuntu. What happens for you?

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Zearin (zearin) said :
#2

Hi!

For me, if I type 'bzr shell' and then 'ls <tab>', it inserts a tab character on the command line. :)

I'm using Mac OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard) and the latest version of Bazaar (1.14.1).

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Best Martin Pool (mbp) said :
#3

That seems to be a bug 376742 in bzrtools; thanks for reporting it and let's take the conversation over there.

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Zearin (zearin) said :
#4

Thanks Martin Pool, that solved my question.