Tab-complete description of top-level command

[jdholtz]

Hello. I am creating a Fish completion script for my own command. I want to add a description for my command when a list of options comes up, but I am unsure how to do this. Currently, the description just says (command).

I already know I can use the --description flag to add a description to subcommands, but I want to do this for my top-level command. I tried to do complete -c $progname -d "<description here>" and looked at the share/completions directory in this repository but I could not find out how to do it.

Here is a screenshot displaying my 'custom-command'. You can see that most of the other commands' descriptions have an actual description, but my 'custom-command' just has (command)

How can I add a custom description for this command. Thanks!

[faho]

This description is either taken from the man page or, for functions, from the --description value.

For example if you define

function custom_command --description "This is my custom command"
    echo Hello I am custom_command
end

You'll see it described as "This is my custom command" - but only once it's loaded, so if it's in a file in ~/.config/fish/functions/ it won't appear until you run it once.

That's also why the completions won't work - before you try to complete the command, i.e. do custom_command <TAB> those aren't loaded.

[jdholtz]

Thanks for the response.

This description is either taken from the man page

My command does have a man page. Would there be any reason fish would not take the description from the man page? Here is a link to my project's man page for reference.

[faho]

Is the man page installed in your man path? Is it listed in the output of __fish_describe_command? Is the command called by the same name as the manpage? Is it listed when you run apropos "^pacman-venv"?

[jdholtz]

Yes, it is installed at /usr/share/man/man8. Those two commands did not output anything with my custom command. What is strange is I can do man pacman-venv and it shows up. It also has the same exact man path as other packages that show a description (I used whereis pacman-venv to see where the man page is located).

I was able to reproduce the issue on another computer with a non-fish environment, so it definitely is not an issue with fish. Thanks for helping me out.

[faho]

See that you've updated the mandb database after you installed it - typically this is done via man-db.timer (which starts man-db.service), or you can manually run mandb as root.

[jdholtz]

Running mandb as root fixed it. Thanks! Previously I only tried running it as my user which makes sense why it wasn’t working correctly.