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A comment on Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal. Parent comment

Re:Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal by michaelpb on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @03:01PM (#27280924)
Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware.

Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60

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Re:Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal by bloopernova on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @04:32PM (#27282241)
It feels like the devs are completely clueless about open source, command line, and modern shell features.

There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.

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Re:Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal by michaelpb on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @01:37PM (#27293592)
Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards.

But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.

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