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by DiabloD3 1527 days ago
I don't understand what Fig is actually for. Why would I want a "visual autocomplete" when I already get what I want out of bash-complete + fzf, a more technically complete and understood solution?
4 comments

I think there are two main areas where we improve the default experience.

1. Zero configuration needed to get started.

With Fig, the experience just works out of the box. A lot of developers - especially people less comfortable with the terminal - don't feel confident installing a bunch of 3rd party zsh completions or creating a custom setup.

2. Extensibility.

We've worked really hard to make the experience of writing your own completions very easy and powerful. Lots of teams are using Fig to make internal scripts and CLI tools more ergonomic and discoverable.

In my experience, writing custom shell completion scripts is not very much fun.

> especially people less comfortable with the terminal - don't feel confident installing a bunch of 3rd party zsh completions or creating a custom setup

are you telling us that your proprietary blackbox that asks my e-mail and sends telemetry data is better than open-source well-documented, widely-used, established tools?

> Lots of teams are using Fig to make internal scripts and CLI tools more ergonomic and discoverable.

can these completions be used outside of Fig?

i guess not, because this doesn’t make you any money?

> In my experience, writing custom shell completion scripts is not very much fun

yep, because nobody usually writes them, they’re autogenerated by whatever CLI framework you’re using

with Fig you write them and yes, writing autocompletions for Fig manually is better than writing Compdef manually

but again, nobody usually writes them…

If zsh is to complicated just use fish...
from what i know the end goal of Fig is to to build a proprietary platform for webapps that run as overlay on top of your terminal

this sounds ridiculous because it is

they can’t drop this shitty idea now, because they took tons of cash from venture capitalists to make it happen

Our mission is to improve the developer experience in the terminal.

We think that layer on new interfaces can help make the commandline even more powerful... as well as making it more accessible. Check out kui[0] to get an idea of what we're imagining.

[0] https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kui

where does terminal lack user-experience in your opinion?

you really think your proprietary, VC-baked, telemetry-enabled product would improve developer experience?

a terminal is accessible as it gets and doesn’t need a web interface

this is just a pervert version of Electron

Tens of thousands of developers use Fig everyday and seem to really enjoy the autocomplete affordances that we've added.

That said, if you already are very comfortable in the terminal, some of the pain points that we're tackling might be less acute for you.

Do you get rounded corners and soft shadows with bash-complete :)
Don't forget the icons ;)
It's a little slicker and less cumbersome.