Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know what they mean, but I know that I really dislike how PS's autocomplete works.

If the possible commands are (for the sake of discussion) `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` and `Get-AppLockerPolicy`.

If you type `Get-App` and hit Tab, it will autofill to `Get-AppLockerFileInformation` which I just really don't like, and I need to keep hitting tab to cycle through all other possible `Get-App*` commands.

What I want is some UI that when I hit tab it autocompletes as much as possible until there's a decision to make, and then shows me the options. So in my example case, it would look something like this:

Type `Get-App` -> hit tab -> shows `Get-AppLocker` -> type "P" -> hit tab -> `Get-AppLockerPolicy` is displayed

bash-ish systems nail this, and they even have the "double tab" to list all options from that point which is normally pretty nice.

The PS idea of "keep hitting tab or shift-tab while you cycle through all possible options" sucks in comparison. Especially with discoverability (There are about 20 commands on my windows system that start with "Get-App", and in order to figure them all out I just need to keep hitting tab until it cycles around)

With PSReadLine, you can change that:

  Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs

Or

  Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function Complete

The first one seems to change it how I want, but the second doesn't. And it doesn't stick around after closing the powershell prompt.

And while I'm sure there's a way to make it persist, a shell's power is in it's ubiquity. If i have to change settings on every machine I work with, i'm probably going to want to use that time to install a different shell.

I know that's an attitude that is pretty impossible for any new shell to solve for, but it's the truth. I'm not choosing the most powerful or "best" shell, i'm choosing the one that gets in my way the least. And for me, that's bash in 99% of cases. And until another comes along that really improves discoverability and makes it easy to learn and adjust to, i'm not going to switch.

I have a ton of knowledge built up over the years about bash and I'm not in a position where I'd be able to dump it all and painfully try to learn everything new from scratch by reading manuals, trying out syntaxes, searching around for if what I want to do is possible, figuring out the "right" way to do things, and more.

Even if it is better in the end, if I can't get over the initial hump, it's not very useful to me. Maybe this is just me getting old...

Making things like that persist is done through the powershell profile stored at $profile. It is the equivalent of a ~/.bashrc.

Actually, that isn't a PowerShell idea.

Firstly, that form of completion has existed in the Microsoft/IBM operating system world for significantly longer than PowerShell has, tabbing backwards and forwards around a list of matches being the way that one did filename completion with some MS/PC/DR-DOS tools back in the 1980s. Secondly, PowerShell ISE can do things differently, so this cannot be a PowerShell thing.

Crank up PowerShell ISE, enter "Get-App", then press Control+Space. For more, press Control+Space to complete an option after entering "-".

I didn't mean to imply that it was a PS creation, or that it was impossible to change, only that it's how PS handles tab completion, and that I dislike it.

Being able to change defaults is nice, but the power of PS or bash is that they are ubiquitous. So anything that has to change defaults to be usable makes it kind of pointless in a lot of ways (at least to me). Because if I need to change defaults on every system i'm on, then why not just use that time to install a different shell? (which is pretty much what I end up doing on windows machines)

Not sure what version you are using, but that is not how PowerShell does completion for me. If I type in `Get-Package` for example and hit tab, I get printed a grid of the possible completions. Then I keep typing until it's not ambiguous, at which point it will complete the whole command. If there are hundreds of suggestions, it will ask if I really want to see them all.

I am running PowerShell 6.1.0 (which I think uses PSReadline). PSReadline is also very customisable, but this is the default behaviour.

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