Shellac Protocol Proposal V2

• Back to Shell Autocompletion
• Original Shellac Protocol Proposal

Requirements

• Shell-agnostic. You can't force zsh to parse bash strings!
• Compatible with existing completion scripts. e.g. _openstack use case
• The minimal thing that solves these requirements.

Design Sketch

Compared to the original Shellac Protocol Proposal

• Remove mention of coprocesses! That is orthogonal. It's just a process now.
• Input side:
  • shellac-provider -- command --myflag 1 --myflag2 f
• Output:
  • { key, value, key, value } in NUL terminated strings
  • Arrays are prefixed with length

Example:

["candidates", "2", "one", "two", "descriptions", "2", "desc1", "desc2"]

This is printed on stdout as a series of NUL-terminated strings.

• Read with read -d $'\0' in bash

What's Wrong with complete -C in bash?

• line-oriented protocol
• COMP_CWORDS is wrong

TODO: Write up more!