[ANNOUNCE] hg "shell" extension

[Brendan Cully]

On Tuesday, 05 February 2008 at 02:50, Mark Williamson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm not aware of anything like this having been done before but maybe I just 
> missed it.  For some reason I've decided it'd be "fun" to dive into playing 
> with Python's readline interface and hacked up a prototype interactive Hg 
> shell.
> 
> The attached patch is a snapshot of how far I've gotten.  It applies with -p0 
> and adds a file "shell.py" to the hgext directory.  There are no other 
> changes to the hg source.
> 
> The "shell" extension implements an interactive commandline for hg, supporting 
> editting, history and tab completion on command names, command options and 
> global opions.  It should work on Unix systems, but I believe not on Windows 
> (which lacks a Python readline module, apparently).
> 
> The tab completion isn't yet as intelligent as it could be, since it doesn't 
> understand which options should also have arguments and it's not able to 
> complete filenames or revision IDs.  I'll hope to add these features in a 
> future release

The zsh completion script has pretty comprehensive context-sensitive
tab completion. I think the bash one is also pretty good, though I
haven't used it. Given that, the shell extension is probably best
suited for windows (or csh users and other inhabitants of purgatory).