Support subparsers

[dan1994]

Might require to change the interface between the zsh completion script and the python script

[ulken]

Cool project you got going!

Currently using argcomplete for Bash-completion, which works fine. However, I would like even better completion for Zsh.

Unfortunately, without support for subparsers, it's not really useful in my case 😢.

Do you plan to work on this anytime soon? Do you expect it to be a lot of work?

I'm not very proficient in Python, nor shell completion, but let me know if I can help out in any way and I'll do my best.

[dan1994]

Thank you!

Honestly, I found the zsh autocompletion system to be very (very!) complex. Both sub-parsers, custom type completion and completion for modules which I thought were not too hard, have proven themselves quite difficult.

To be honest, I'm not going to implement them in the near future, if at all (Maybe after I finish my thesis).

If you feel up to the task of helping me out with this feature, let me know. I do ask that you acquire some basic understanding of the zsh autocompletion system. If you have any questions about how pyzshcomplete works and what are the challenges for sub-parsers feel free to ask.

[ulken]

I hear you. Zsh is powerful, but hairy (a shame).

Most likely I'm not up for the task, but I'll probably read the chapter on completion in the book you suggest some day. Then we'll see.

If you don't mind, please provide your insights around particular challenges you've run into with sub-parsers.

Good luck with your thesis!

PS. Might want to update this section in the README:

Subparsers - Subparsers will be supported in the near future.

[dan1994]

Wow, sorry for missing your reply (thesis is indeed intense).

If you don't mind, please provide your insights around particular challenges you've run into with sub-parsers.

The zsh completion system contains many built-ins and utilities built around them, intermixed with the incredibly complex context system. It is pretty hard to learn to use them as the best resources are books and there's not many stack overflow discussions for specific bugs or misunderstandings.

Additionally, all existing completions don't target arbitrary scripts but command line tools with known options. This makes the way they deal with subparsers very specific, and hard to replicate for this use case.

I "mastered" the _arguments utility which is great for parsing standard command line arguments, but is not enough by itself to handle sub-parsers. In fact everything the pyzshcomplete module does is to generate the input to _arguments and print it for use by the utility in the zsh script (see here).

This is not enough for the subparsers use-case, and will probably need to be changed. Instead of simply generating the arguments to _arguments, it will need to generate a zsh script that will invoke _arguments along with complementary logic (which I don't yet have).

Hope this provides some insight about the complexity.

PS. Might want to update this section in the README:

Subparsers - Subparsers will be supported in the near future.

I'm considering taking another look when I submit my thesis (not long now), but if I'll give up, I'll update the README.

[marble]

Great work so far! Should you look into this again - let me know. I'm trying to find a solution too.