Homesick Bash completion

Your dotfiles hold a lot of stuff in them: You’ve most probably spent a while accumulating handy Bash functions, config and variables and that all gets stored in lots of hidden files that live in your $HOME directory. If you change machines maybe between home and work or you like to keep everything version controlled for peace of mind, or you just Git (like me), I recommend you check out Homesick by Josh Nicols.

I use it a hell of a lot for all of my dotfiles, but one thing that I feel it’s missing out-of-the-box is Bash completion. I mash my tab button all day and all night and when a command doesn’t respond to my furious tabbing, it makes me feel sad that I’m going to have to use a whole lotta energy to think what parameters I want to give a command and the path to a file, etc. It really is awful

So, I thought: “I use Homebrew all the time and it’s never cost me a penny, so why not give something back and write my own Bash completion?” That’s just what I did!

You can install with:

brew tap homebrew/completions # Tap the homebrew-completions repo
brew install homesick-completion

This is my first Bash completion script that I’ve written. Previous to this, I had no idea how packages allowed you to tab complete stuff so this was a really interesting exercise to find out how it’s done, whilst doing something useful at the same time!

You can find the repo on GitHub here. If you’ve git any ideas for improvements, feel free to submit a pull request, or if you get any problems, open up an issue.

I hope this helps someone out!