zet

Inferred Completion from Usage is Idiotic

I’m sick and tired of reading all the write ups claiming that Zsh completion and Fish are “superior” to Bash and the rest because they are good at guessing the completion from the usage documentation full of shitty dashed options and impossible to speak or remember parameters. It is not the shells job to do your completion for you. It is the job of the program itself, and always has been.

Thing about how fragile that completion system is. It is 100% dependent on people agreeing about the “standard” for parameters, options, and usage documentation. Sure you can creation your own completion, but it has to be written in a separate program and placed carefully into the system that Zsh controls. You have to have an entire fucking package installer just to get completion on the system with your simple utility. That’s just stupid, really stupid. All that work should not only be allowed and supported in the programs themselves, but preferred and encouraged. IT IS THE FUCKING PROGRAM’S JOB TO DO ITS OWN COMPLETION!

I’m probably the only person on planet Earth who feels this way at this point. Everyone has bought into this fucking insanity. But I just don’t give a shit. The status quo for command line UX is fucking horrible and needs to die the death it has deserved for more than a decade. The age of speakable, intelligent command line interfaces where the commands are responsible for their own completion and documentation is the way of the future and present. I’ve never wanted CmdBox to be completed more.

Don’t get mad. Get busy.