Completion on bash¶

This is a recording of a real bash session — the hook loaded the way the next section describes, Tab Tab listing the candidates (bash's default reveals the list on the second press; one press completes as far as the match reaches), a prefix completing. Regenerated from a live shell on every docs build, so it cannot drift from what your terminal will do:

bash's list is names only — readline has no description column, so the one-line docstrings that zsh, fish, PowerShell, and nushell render next to each candidate don't appear here. If you want the list on a single press, that's readline's show-all-if-ambiguous in your ~/.inputrc.

Install¶

fm --install-completion bash

This writes the hook to $XDG_DATA_HOME/fm/completion.bash (default ~/.local/share/fm/completion.bash) and appends one guarded source line to ~/.bashrc. On macOS — where Terminal opens login shells that never read .bashrc — the line also lands in your login profile (.bash_profile, .bash_login, or .profile, whichever exists). Running it twice changes nothing. The hook works on bash 3.2, so the ancient /bin/bash macOS ships is fine.

For the current session only — no rc file touched:

eval "$(fm --setup-completion bash)"

Windows (git-bash)¶

git-bash is a first-class target: fm --install-completion with no argument detects it (via the MSYSTEM variable it exports — PowerShell's PSModulePath is machine-level and set inside git-bash too, so it can't be the tell), and the source line written into ~/.bashrc uses the MSYS spelling /c/Users/… rather than a backslashed Windows path, which bash would read as escapes and silently source nothing.

Detection works from a git-bash session, which is where you'd be typing: the launcher exports MSYSTEM, and that's the tell. A bare bash.exe spawned by some other Windows program doesn't have it and is indistinguishable from any other process, so footman falls back to the PowerShell answer there — name the shell explicitly (fm --install-completion bash) if you're in that unusual spot.

What you get¶

Task names, group names, flags, and choice values all complete, chain-aware:

$ fm dep<TAB>          →  fm deploy
$ fm deploy <TAB>      →  dev  staging  prod

The honest limitation: bash's completion protocol has no description column. Where zsh, fish, and nushell show each task's one-line docstring next to its name, bash can only display bare words — so footman strips the descriptions before handing candidates over. If the described column is the part you love, the zsh and fish pages show the same completions with descriptions intact.

Colours and appearance¶

What little bash offers here belongs to readline, configured in ~/.inputrc — these apply to all completion, not just fm:

# Colour the part of each candidate you've already typed.
set colored-completion-prefix on

# Colour candidates by file type (uses $LS_COLORS) — mostly matters for
# path completion inside task arguments.
set colored-stats on

# Show all candidates immediately instead of beeping first…
set show-all-if-ambiguous on

# …or cycle through them in place with repeated TABs.
TAB: menu-complete

Start a new shell (or bind -f ~/.inputrc) to pick changes up. There is no way to colour a description column, because there isn't one — that's bash, not footman.

Uninstall¶

fm --uninstall-completion bash

Removes the script and the source line from every rc file the installer touched.