Autocomplete in the Terminal with Zsh

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Hey! I spent some time working on terminal autocompletion and wanted to share what I found.

zsh-final

I ended up using Zsh, and I’ve put together a minimal reproducible script for Home Manager to set it up. You can check out the short blog post for more background, motivation, and a few extra details.

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  home.username = "nixos";
  home.homeDirectory = "/home/nixos";

  home.stateVersion = "24.05"; 

  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    oh-my-posh
    git
  ];

  programs.zsh = {
    enable = true;
    plugins = [
      {
        name = "zsh-autocomplete"; # completes history, commands, etc.
        src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "marlonrichert";
          repo = "zsh-autocomplete";
          rev = "762afacbf227ecd173e899d10a28a478b4c84a3f";
          sha256 = "1357hygrjwj5vd4cjdvxzrx967f1d2dbqm2rskbz5z1q6jri1hm3";
        }; # e.g., nix-prefetch-url --unpack https://github.com/marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete/archive/762afacbf227ecd173e899d10a28a478b4c84a3f.tar.gz
      }
    ];

    oh-my-zsh = {
      enable = true;
      plugins = [ "z" ];
      extraConfig = ''
                # Required for autocomplete with box: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/778868
                zstyle ':completion:*' completer _expand _complete _ignored _approximate _expand_alias
                zstyle ':autocomplete:*' default-context curcontext 
                zstyle ':autocomplete:*' min-input 0

                setopt HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS

                autoload -Uz compinit
                compinit

                setopt autocd  # cd without writing 'cd'
                setopt globdots # show dotfiles in autocomplete list
      '';
    };

    autosuggestion.enable = true;
    syntaxHighlighting.enable = true;
    history = {
      size = 10000;
    };

    # Extra configurations for Zsh
    initExtra = ''
      # Oh-My-Posh initialization for Zsh
      eval "$(oh-my-posh init zsh --config /mnt/c/Users/toted/OneDrive/prog/oh-my-posh/mytheme.omp.json)"

      # zsh-autocomplete
      bindkey -M menuselect '^M' .accept-line # run code when selected completion
        '';
  };
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