pcmpl-args – Enhanced shell command completion

pcmpl-args extends option and argument completion of shell commands read by Emacs. It is intended to make shell completion in Emacs comparable to the rather excellent completion provided by both Bash and Zsh.

This package uses pcomplete to define completion handlers which are used whenever shell completion is performed. This includes when commands are read in the minibuffer via shell-command (M-!) or in shell-mode.

Completion support is provided for many different commands including:

• GNU core utilities (ls, rm, mv, date, sort, cut, printf, …)
• Built-in shell commands (if, test, time, …)
• Various GNU/Linux commands (find, xargs, grep, man, tar, …)
• Version control systems (bzr, git, hg, …)

Installation

To use this package, install pcmpl-args via your package manager from Melpa and add the following to your init.el:

(require 'pcmpl-args)

Note: This package redefines the following functions:

• pcomplete/bzip2
• pcomplete/chgrp
• pcomplete/chown
• pcomplete/gdb
• pcomplete/gzip
• pcomplete/make
• pcomplete/rm
• pcomplete/rmdir
• pcomplete/tar
• pcomplete/time
• pcomplete/which
• pcomplete/xargs

Defining new completion commands

This package contains a number of utilities for defining new pcomplete completion commands:

pcmpl-args-pcomplete

Can be used to define completion for commands that have complex option and argument parsing.

pcmpl-args-pcomplete-on-help

Completion via parsing the output of COMMAND --help.

pcmpl-args-pcomplete-on-man

Completion via parsing the output of man COMMAND.