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Enhance shell autocompletion with a cool new user interface and shell completion protocol #3121
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Hello! Thank you for the new interesting project!
I just want to let you know about 🚀 Upterm — really great proof of concept but it stopped because maintainer was gone. This terminal looks like 21st century terminal. Very sad that it isn't supported.
Reacted by Andy Kipp, Václav Dohnal, Ignacio Buioli, Catalin Tudorache, Giovanni Bassi, Time Paradogs, SK, Martynas Prokopas, AnLAdmin, Luan Vitor Simião Oliveira and 44 more
Reacted by Cosimo Chellini and Alan Ninan Thomas
Reacted by Andy Kipp, Ignacio Buioli, unuunc, Time Paradogs, SK, Davide Benvegnù aka CoderDave, Ayan Mullick, Cosimo Chellini, Grzegorz Przybylski, Alan Ninan Thomas and 8 more
Reacted by Andy Kipp, unuunc, Time Paradogs, Davide Benvegnù aka CoderDave, Cosimo Chellini, Alan Ninan Thomas, Thorsten Sommer and Antonio Redondo
Reacted by Time Paradogs, Ayan Mullick, Cosimo Chellini, Grzegorz Przybylski, Alan Ninan Thomas and mbd3v
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Accessibility trackingA feature that would ideally be fulfilled by us having an extension model.Communication between processesIssues pertaining to the user interface of the Console or TerminalAccessibility trackingAccessibility trackingAccessibility trackingAccessibility trackingAccessibility trackingComplex enough to require an in depth planning process and actual budgeted, scheduled work.The new Windows Terminal.
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[-]Concept of 21st century terminal[/-][+]Enhance shell autocompletion with a cool new user interface and shell completion protocol[/+]zadjii-msft commentedon Oct 24, 2019
This looks really cool, though this looks like something the shell would have to work with the terminal to achieve.
How was Upterm providing those autocomplete suggestions? Did they have their own shell they were using, or were they somehow pulling the auto-completions from bash/zsh/git somehow?
Presuming the shell provided a list of autocompletion suggestions to the terminal, drawing the UI shouldn't be that hard. Cmd would obviously never be able to support this, but powershell core sure could. I'd be curious what kind of perf there would be for something like that, with the shell emitting a list of auto-completion suggestions after some delay/on every character typed.
Doing the collapsible json thing might be quite a bit harder however :P that definitely seems like they had a custom rolled
catthat worked directly with the terminal.huoyaoyuan commentedon Nov 15, 2019
I think you can get inspired by Visual Studio's C# Interactive and PowerShell ISE.
PowerShell already has a mechanism to collect completions, which is used by
dotnet.exe.And also, don't forget the great Language Server Protocol by Visual Studio.
n3wt0n commentedon Feb 4, 2020
That would be really cool, or something like the iTerm 2 autocompletion on Mac. (cmd + ;)
This works for both files/folder and commands
remkop commentedon May 19, 2020
Mike Griese (@zadjii-msft)
Cmd could certainly achieve bash-like completion: clink enhances Cmd with tab completion, which users can customize with simple lua scripts.
While not as fancy looking as the screenshots above, it would be hugely valuable if Cmd would support this out of the box.
(More detail: see docs and pre-built completions for common tools.)
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Welding-Torch commentedon Feb 28, 2024
I just started using Warp for WSL and it feels like it's lightyears ahead of this stuff. I think it would be great if Windows Terminal took some notes from it, especially on this feature request that's been open since 2019.
Also mentioned earlier in this thread by: Alan Ninan Thomas (@just1a-person) in 2021 and Dennis E. Hamilton (@orcmid).
Add descriptions to commands (namely, snippets) (#17376)
Add a spec for "Snippets" (#17329)
Jaykul commentedon Sep 10, 2025
For what it's worth, after playing with the current preview bits ....
If the pretty terminal GUI gets the same information as the PowerShell TUI but just shows less of it, I don't think just the UI is going to win me over.
I need that menu to be wider, and I need some sort of support for that extra tool-tip text like what's in #3121 (comment) or in any of the default PowerShell ctrl+space completions for command names, where when you highlight one of the options you get a syntax block:
Otherwise, I'm trading off the TUI for GUI but loosing information...
Obviously the risk here is that there's a little bit of a feature race going on when it comes to in-terminal help/completion/menus/etc., so there's every chance that as soon as you add support for some extra text, someone starts adding whole doc pages in a fzf style three-pane thing, or ... I don't know what ;-)
I still feel like this completion needs to at least be able to show the current information PowerShell feeds it ;)
DHowett commentedon Sep 10, 2025
weeeelll so far it feeds it nothing. that's somewhat what this deliverable is tracking: a protocol using-which PowerShell can feed it. :)
Tyriar commentedon Sep 10, 2025
FWIW I ripped the pwsh session based completions out of VS Code in favor of the generic fig ones and LSP-based completions. At least the way we did it, feeding completions through the pty as the transport mechanism ended up locking up the terminal too much since it's the only pipe for I/O.