Completion when program has sub-commands

Question

I have written a command-line tool that uses sub-commands much like Mercurial, Git, Subversion &c., in that its general usage is:

>myapp [OPTS] SUBCOMMAND [SUBCOMMAND-OPTS] [ARGS]

E.g.

>myapp --verbose speak --voice=samantha --quickly "hello there"

I'm now in the process of building Zsh completion for it but have quickly found out that it is a very complex beast. I have had a look at the _hg and _git completions but they are very complex and different in approach (I struggle to understand them), but both seem to handle each sub-command separately.

Does anyone know if there a way using the built in functions (_arguments, _values, pick_variant &c.) to handle the concept of sub-commands correctly, including handling general options and sub-command specific options appropriately? Or would the best approach be to manually handle the general options and sub-command?

A noddy example would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

you are right in that writing completion scripts for zsh can be quite difficult. Your best bet is to use an existing one as a guide. The one for git is way too much for a beginner, imo. You can use this repo:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-completions

As for your question, you have use the concept of state. You define your subcommands in a list, and then identify via $state which command you are in. Then you define the options for each command. You can see this in the completion script for play. A simplified version is below:

_play() {
  local ret=1

  _arguments -C \
    '1: :_play_cmds' \
    '*::arg:->args' \
  && ret=0

  case $state in
    (args)
       case $line[1] in
         (build-module|list-modules|lm|check|id)
           _message 'no more arguments' && ret=0
         ;;
         (dependencies|deps)
           _arguments \
             '1:: :_play_apps' \
             '(--debug)--debug[Debug mode (even more informations logged than in verbose mode)]' \
             '(--jpda)--jpda[Listen for JPDA connection. The process will  suspended until a client is plugged to the JPDA port.]' \
             '(--sync)--sync[Keep lib/ and modules/ directory synced. Delete unknow dependencies.]' \
             '(--verbose)--verbose[Verbose Mode]' \
             && ret=0
         ;;
       esac
   esac

(If you are going to paste this, use the original source, as this won't work).

It looks daunting, but the general idea is not that complicated. The subcommand comes first (_play_cmds is a list of subcommands with a description for each one), then come the arguments. The arguments are built based on which subcommand you are choosing. Note that you can group multiple subcommands, if they share arguments.

with man zshcompsys you can find more info about the whole system, although it is somewhat dense.