Wednesday, December 17, 2008

From the productivity improvement department...

As a software developer, one of the things I rely upon to get the job done is autocomplete.  It is a feature I use every day whether that be in the bash shell or Eclipse.   The bottom line is that autocomplete saves keystrokes, and, therefore helps me get the job done just a little bit faster.  Autocomplete is a close second to sliced bread.

Now, something that is actually better than sliced bread is Capistrano.  If you've followed our blog, you know that we use Capistrano to deploy our code to EC2 and for other system administration tasks.

So, what if we could take the utility of autocomplete and marry it with the power of Capistrano?  Well, I came across a site that provides a ruby script that does just this.  The script supports Capistrano namespaces and utilizes a bash capability know as programmable completion.  The result?  Pure joy for yours truly.  

Here's an example of the autocomplete capability in action:



In the terminal window, I typed cap common:s[TAB] and was shown a list of possible completions.

If you are a Capistrano user you should definitely check it out.  I highly recommended it.

1 comment:

Timo said...

If you are a Mac user and are looking for more autocomplete goodness try: this 'port install bash-completion'. It contains autocomplete for commands such as ssh, svn, cvs, find, tar, etc.