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Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free too

Nice website, but I wouldn't switch to this from Fish/Zsh on account of: 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? 3. Requirement of email. 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. 5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux would forever be an afterthought since you released for Mac first (presumably, this was driven by financial reasons).

stakkur 5y ago
You summarized my exact feelings about it, especially #1, 4, and 5. I get the feeling that the team hasn't done their homework on potential users and existing solutions.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  No, I think it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. We know now that free doesn't really work.
  - Kudos 5y ago
    Virtually the entirety of my desktop stack and dev tools are OSS. Can you clarify what you mean by "does not work" here?
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    >> it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. If it is worthwhile and not freely available, I will certainly pay. There are some great IDEs and tools that fit into this category. >> We know now that free doesn't really work. I suppose it depends on your needs, but I find using free tools such as zsh, vim, tmux, linux, and many others very valuable to me.
    - michaelpb 5y ago
      Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware. Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60
      - bloopernova 5y ago
        It feels like the devs are completely clueless about open source, command line, and modern shell features. There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.
        michaelpb 5y ago
        Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards. But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.
  - shaicoleman 5y ago
    I'm willing to pay if it's on hacker friendly terms, e.g. something similar to the Sublime Text model: * No sign in/email required * Works offline * No subscription * Updates for 3 years included in price * Perpetual license for older versions * License per user, unlimited devices and operating systems, including home/work devices * License is just a matter of copying a file * No telemetry/phoning home without explicit opt-in * No DRM/copy protection * No root access required * Works on Linux
    - simias 5y ago
      I'm on the same boat, although I have an additional requirement that disqualifies Sublime Text: I want the software to be source-available. Not necessarily FLOSS, but I want to know that if push comes to shove I can hack the code and recompile the software. I don't want to have to rely on the devs if I want to tweak something that's not meant to be configurable, or if I need to run the software on some unsupported configuration and it breaks.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      Unless something external changes the incentives in the market you aren’t gonna see bits in a box return as a business model any time soon. ARR is the only metric that matters to get you funding, it’s way more expensive to support multiple versions than something evergreen, and you can’t really do per-user unlimited device licensing without a login. You can fake it with per user keys but then someone has to have a login to manage them still and your key is now essentially just a login where self-service password resets can’t be done. Why bother when companies clamor for SSO about a billion times more than they ask for anonymous user accounts?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
      Sublime is special. I don't think anything can come close to it.
  - Hammershaft 5y ago
    Free doesn't really work? What do you think about linux, git, emacs, blender, vulkan, etc?
mschrage 5y ago
We started with macOS because I have a background in Swift development. Linux is definitely not an after thought to us! As for the telemetry concerns, I totally get that. We've tried to strike a balance and it seems like we've got it wrong. This will be fixed in the next update.
- sidlls 5y ago
  The correct balance is 0% of terminal activity is sent with telemetry, unless the user explicitly and specifically authorizes it.
  - mschrage 5y ago
    Just to clarify, the text you type into the terminal NEVER leaves your device. Fig does not store or collect this information. We send an event when you insert something using Fig's autocomplete, so we can get a sense for how frequently people use the app. We also send which completion spec (eg. git, npm or cd) was used to generate the suggestions to know which commands to prioritize.
    - sidlls 5y ago
      A distinction without difference, in my opinion. And it doesn't change the fact that anything other than 0% telemetry without full, complete disclosure and permission from the user is not good.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      So wait a second, the text I type into the terminal never leaves my device, but the commands I invoke do? What's the difference?
      - rabidrat 5y ago
        Yeah just don't accidentally paste your password into a terminal and press Enter.
verdverm 5y ago
Point 2 is how I feel these days. It's hard to trust any low-level (installable) dev tools supported by VCs. Personally, that hard to trust is also moving up the stack, maybe more so because of the increased attacks on the software supply chain vendors (i.e. CodeCov, SolarWinds)
- paulgb 5y ago
  > maybe more so because of the increased attacks on the software supply chain vendors I'm intrigued by this but not 100% sure I follow. Is the implication that VC-backed startups are more likely to suffer from a supply-chain attack, or just more general reluctance to incorporate any new tech into the stack as it increases the attack surface area?
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Probably a little of both. I'm personally reducing this surface area with clients in light of recent attacks. Personally, something like this w.r.t. VC means that incentives will diverge and they lose touch with what it means to be a dev tool. w.r.t. supply chain, it's probably more of a correlation (related to) that they will eventually have the large companies as enterprise customers who are the real target. Also, once making money becomes the primary driver, other important tasks are deprioritized. I've seen both the tools and their correct usage go to the wayside. Most abstractly I think the misaligned incentives is what happens. I'm not convinced that VCs get dev tools and don't ruin them.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Have there been any attacks that are able to exploit iTerm shell integrations or similar tooling?
      - verdverm 5y ago
        ITerm has had security issues, yes, but that is besides the point. With this product, are their collaboration features secure? Are their servers which support that secure? You are installing a tool which phones home on each command Why do I even want a shared terminal?
colonelpopcorn 5y ago
You can stop at #1. Why do I need this when oh-my-zsh exists?
- Exuma 5y ago
  which oh-my-zsh plugins do you use that can do this? Is there an all-encompassing one or do you need to download tons of different ones like a docker plugin, git plugin, etc
  - kubami 5y ago
    But I think it will be the same with Fig. They will take the autocomplete scripts from the vendors and integrate them with Fig.
  - mjochim 5y ago
    I’ve been using grml’s zsh config [1] for years. It’s one file, I’ve never installed a single plugin, and it’s been doing a lot. Couple of examples: - When I auto-complete a path, the shell prints all options and I can navigate between them with either tab or arrow keys - For many tools, like git, auto-completion shows an annotated list of possible options/subcommands (and again, you can navigate them with tab or arrow keys) - If I type something like chmod 644 and then start auto-completing the filename, the suggestions exclude every file that is already 644. Also, there is a format to add auto-complete information for more tools. I’ve never actively used it, though, and I don’t know if it’s been adopted by any other shell/tool. I don’t even know if it’s specific to zsh or to grml’s config or to something else entirely. It has just stayed out of my way, while greatly facilitating my shell usage. As a last point, none of these examples have been added recently. They have all been there for years. This is not to pick on fig, but rather to show what zsh has been doing all along (and I suppose other shells like fish, too, but I’ve never tried). [1] https://grml.org/zsh/ https://grml.org/zsh/
- nerdponx 5y ago
  They are totally different things. This is like asking why you need a computer at home when you already get the newspaper delivered every morning.
rkeene2 5y ago
Point #4 is particularly salient since it seems like telemetry information for a CLI-based tool which monitors the user's keystrokes doesn't provide the user any advantages.
pclark 5y ago
#2 is really quite absurd - especially here of all places - how do you decide if a product or service will never "sell out"?
- 12ian34 5y ago
  Absurd? I'm definitely more confident that Fish/Zsh will stay free forever without changing their incentives, licensing and pricing than a YC-backed startup whose primary goal is to make money.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I generally try to avoid startups and either go for established companies (business offers are more likely to stay there and work as expected) or small bootstrapped business (cheap, more likely to stay true to their roots, do one thing well without breaking everything in the future). Startups are good for free trials as they have VC money to spend or finished deals (purchase once, consume once, forget about them).
nerdponx 5y ago
#1 I do not agree with. This is a great idea for a tool, and I am willing to pay for it. This is an extension to my terminal and a useful adjunct to my shell, not a replacement for either. #5, maybe but that's fine. Lots of things are Mac-only or Linux-only. It's a proof of concept. Moreover they appear to be working on some kind of standard specification for completion meta-data, which other tools can start to adopt and use if it turns out to be a useful spec. #2-4, it's open source (at least it looks like it's open source from the website). If the startup sells out, the project can be forked.
- 12ian34 5y ago
  #1 That's fair. Each to their own. For me I wouldn't be willing to pay even £1 a year for it. #2-4 Firstly, just because it can be forked is not to say that it will. It's not easy to maintain a whole project in your spare time. Also, this may be a moot point since the completion engine is supposedly proprietary (as per another commenter).
- jrm4 5y ago
  I have found "it's open source" to be a real-life meaningless response to "I prefer tools that I am likely able to have a significant amount of autonomous control over in the future." The software market has very effectively figured out how to make things "open source" in name only (offhand, Canvas is the one that's killing me these days), and unfortunately now all such claims must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
- cerved 5y ago
  #5 is crucial, I highly value cross platform comparability. The existing differences are annoying enough as it is
avinassh 5y ago
Can you suggest some tools which auto suggest like Fig and work with zsh? The built in auto complete in zsh works nicely, but how do I get the drop down of all options?
- elteto 5y ago
  Maybe https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  This is the closest I see: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh Since switching to it from the default shell of Mac OS terminal (zsh I think) I have found it immensely productive. Some of the things it does seem Magic like auto completing uncommitted files when I say “git add <tab>”
  - ttt0 5y ago
    ohmyzsh is a plugin manager for zsh, not a different shell.
  - lobocinza 5y ago
    https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
- kubami 5y ago
  Each needs to define an autocomplete script. oh-my-zsh provides plugins that do that for common tools like git. Those scripts are usually supplied by the CLI tool itself. For example for terraform: https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/commands/index.html#shell-tab-completion https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/commands/index.html#shell-...
- lobocinza 5y ago
  You need no tool at all as you can do I reverse search in any shell with ^R. If you want to do it with a better UX you can use fzf. If you want the suggestions you can use zsh-autosuggestions or fish shell. Setting them up is straightforward. And if you want an example config for Zsh you can look mine. Zinit, the package manager, automatically load/install the plugins when loading the shell. https://github.com/danisztls/dotfiles/blob/main/shell/zshrc https://github.com/danisztls/dotfiles/blob/main/shell/zshrc
zumu 5y ago
> 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? > 3. Requirement of email. > 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. Dovetailing on these... Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing?
- dvt 5y ago
  Just adding, from their website: > Investors: We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives. The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Eh money is trying to park itself somewhere. Maybe the founders sold this as a way to get dev telemetry data + a subscription.
    - H8crilA 5y ago
      Yeah but if there's dev telemetry involved it's a no-go from me. Definitely a no-go, the terminal is sensitive.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    WTF indeed. There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless. Casting aside the environment of low-interest rates and massive inflow of investment in startups, how does a product like this otherwise raise several millions? The pitch sounds like something that a competent indie dev studio could sell on the Mac App Store...
zzyzxd 5y ago
> 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. It does have the features I want, although not enough to convince me to switch right now. cli can be painful if you are working on commands you are not familiar with. IMHO, this is a better interface than the ones in Fish/Zsh, that provides richer information regarding command choices, hence can be a huge improvement for discoverability. Imagine that you are not familiar with AWS EC2 and want to spin up an instance to play with. If you do that via awscli, first you need to run a bunch of `--help` commands to find the correct subcommands(`aws ec2`, and then `aws ec2 run-instances`), after that, there are 40+ flags for `run-instances`, some are mandatory, some are optional. If you do that from the web console, there's a very friendly wizard with several pages breaking down by networking, storage, OS...etc, intuitive and easy to understand.
- mschrage 5y ago
  The aws-cli is a monster! This exactly the type of situation where we envision Fig being really helpful :)
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Speaking of, how did you generate the specs for the AWS cli and everything else? I wouldn't have thought that info is nicely laid out and documented somewhere.
simias 5y ago
I agree with all of your points and I probably would never use this product. That being said regarding Linux support, given the fact that Fig effectively needs to hook into your terminal emulator and your shell to drive a custom overlay, it seems like it would be a huge headache to add support for Linux given how heterogeneous the terminal setups can be on the platform. Imagine having to support urxvt running zsh on X11 and the gnome terminal running bash on Wayland or xterm running tcsh or... I think on Linux it would make more sense to directly modify one of the many existing terminal emulators to add this functionality or you'll have to severely limit the supported configurations.
- mschrage 5y ago
  Thanks for your insight here! We are still deciding the exact implementation, but completely agree - Linux is a challenge due to the heterogeneity of distros, window managers, compositors, etc. Our macOS approach might not work everywhere.
smsm42 5y ago
4 is a killer for me. I like the idea, I'd probably like the tool, but no way I'm installing a thing that sends out everything (or substantial part of) I type into CLI to the external server. Too much risk. I am ready to trust they mean well and make the maximum effort to make it work securely, but it's just not something I'd ever feel comfortable with.
cholojuanito 5y ago
>5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux would forever be an afterthought since you released for Mac first (presumably, this was driven by financial reasons). I am amazed that a CLI tool isn't made for Linux

stakkur 5y ago

You summarized my exact feelings about it, especially #1, 4, and 5. I get the feeling that the team hasn't done their homework on potential users and existing solutions.

mwcampbell 5y ago
No, I think it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. We know now that free doesn't really work.
- Kudos 5y ago
  Virtually the entirety of my desktop stack and dev tools are OSS. Can you clarify what you mean by "does not work" here?
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  >> it's incumbent on us developers to be more willing to pay for things. If it is worthwhile and not freely available, I will certainly pay. There are some great IDEs and tools that fit into this category. >> We know now that free doesn't really work. I suppose it depends on your needs, but I find using free tools such as zsh, vim, tmux, linux, and many others very valuable to me.
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    Yeah this project totally completely baffled me. "Autocomplete for the Terminal". What?? Bash has had fully programmable auto-completion for over 20 years [1] -- and that's just one comparitively bare-bones shell, out of dozens that are all free forever and not spyware. Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60
    - bloopernova 5y ago
      It feels like the devs are completely clueless about open source, command line, and modern shell features. There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.
      - michaelpb 5y ago
        Right: Assuming good faith, this project seems completely backwards. But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.
- shaicoleman 5y ago
  I'm willing to pay if it's on hacker friendly terms, e.g. something similar to the Sublime Text model: * No sign in/email required * Works offline * No subscription * Updates for 3 years included in price * Perpetual license for older versions * License per user, unlimited devices and operating systems, including home/work devices * License is just a matter of copying a file * No telemetry/phoning home without explicit opt-in * No DRM/copy protection * No root access required * Works on Linux
  - simias 5y ago
    I'm on the same boat, although I have an additional requirement that disqualifies Sublime Text: I want the software to be source-available. Not necessarily FLOSS, but I want to know that if push comes to shove I can hack the code and recompile the software. I don't want to have to rely on the devs if I want to tweak something that's not meant to be configurable, or if I need to run the software on some unsupported configuration and it breaks.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Unless something external changes the incentives in the market you aren’t gonna see bits in a box return as a business model any time soon. ARR is the only metric that matters to get you funding, it’s way more expensive to support multiple versions than something evergreen, and you can’t really do per-user unlimited device licensing without a login. You can fake it with per user keys but then someone has to have a login to manage them still and your key is now essentially just a login where self-service password resets can’t be done. Why bother when companies clamor for SSO about a billion times more than they ask for anonymous user accounts?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    Sublime is special. I don't think anything can come close to it.
- Hammershaft 5y ago
  Free doesn't really work? What do you think about linux, git, emacs, blender, vulkan, etc?

mschrage 5y ago

We started with macOS because I have a background in Swift development. Linux is definitely not an after thought to us! As for the telemetry concerns, I totally get that. We've tried to strike a balance and it seems like we've got it wrong. This will be fixed in the next update.

sidlls 5y ago
The correct balance is 0% of terminal activity is sent with telemetry, unless the user explicitly and specifically authorizes it.
- mschrage 5y ago
  Just to clarify, the text you type into the terminal NEVER leaves your device. Fig does not store or collect this information. We send an event when you insert something using Fig's autocomplete, so we can get a sense for how frequently people use the app. We also send which completion spec (eg. git, npm or cd) was used to generate the suggestions to know which commands to prioritize.
  - sidlls 5y ago
    A distinction without difference, in my opinion. And it doesn't change the fact that anything other than 0% telemetry without full, complete disclosure and permission from the user is not good.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    So wait a second, the text I type into the terminal never leaves my device, but the commands I invoke do? What's the difference?
    - rabidrat 5y ago
      Yeah just don't accidentally paste your password into a terminal and press Enter.

verdverm 5y ago

Point 2 is how I feel these days. It's hard to trust any low-level (installable) dev tools supported by VCs. Personally, that hard to trust is also moving up the stack, maybe more so because of the increased attacks on the software supply chain vendors (i.e. CodeCov, SolarWinds)

paulgb 5y ago
> maybe more so because of the increased attacks on the software supply chain vendors I'm intrigued by this but not 100% sure I follow. Is the implication that VC-backed startups are more likely to suffer from a supply-chain attack, or just more general reluctance to incorporate any new tech into the stack as it increases the attack surface area?
- verdverm 5y ago
  Probably a little of both. I'm personally reducing this surface area with clients in light of recent attacks. Personally, something like this w.r.t. VC means that incentives will diverge and they lose touch with what it means to be a dev tool. w.r.t. supply chain, it's probably more of a correlation (related to) that they will eventually have the large companies as enterprise customers who are the real target. Also, once making money becomes the primary driver, other important tasks are deprioritized. I've seen both the tools and their correct usage go to the wayside. Most abstractly I think the misaligned incentives is what happens. I'm not convinced that VCs get dev tools and don't ruin them.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Have there been any attacks that are able to exploit iTerm shell integrations or similar tooling?
    - verdverm 5y ago
      ITerm has had security issues, yes, but that is besides the point. With this product, are their collaboration features secure? Are their servers which support that secure? You are installing a tool which phones home on each command Why do I even want a shared terminal?

colonelpopcorn 5y ago

You can stop at #1. Why do I need this when oh-my-zsh exists?

Exuma 5y ago
which oh-my-zsh plugins do you use that can do this? Is there an all-encompassing one or do you need to download tons of different ones like a docker plugin, git plugin, etc
- kubami 5y ago
  But I think it will be the same with Fig. They will take the autocomplete scripts from the vendors and integrate them with Fig.
- mjochim 5y ago
  I’ve been using grml’s zsh config [1] for years. It’s one file, I’ve never installed a single plugin, and it’s been doing a lot. Couple of examples: - When I auto-complete a path, the shell prints all options and I can navigate between them with either tab or arrow keys - For many tools, like git, auto-completion shows an annotated list of possible options/subcommands (and again, you can navigate them with tab or arrow keys) - If I type something like chmod 644 and then start auto-completing the filename, the suggestions exclude every file that is already 644. Also, there is a format to add auto-complete information for more tools. I’ve never actively used it, though, and I don’t know if it’s been adopted by any other shell/tool. I don’t even know if it’s specific to zsh or to grml’s config or to something else entirely. It has just stayed out of my way, while greatly facilitating my shell usage. As a last point, none of these examples have been added recently. They have all been there for years. This is not to pick on fig, but rather to show what zsh has been doing all along (and I suppose other shells like fish, too, but I’ve never tried). [1] https://grml.org/zsh/ https://grml.org/zsh/
nerdponx 5y ago
They are totally different things. This is like asking why you need a computer at home when you already get the newspaper delivered every morning.

rkeene2 5y ago

Point #4 is particularly salient since it seems like telemetry information for a CLI-based tool which monitors the user's keystrokes doesn't provide the user any advantages.

pclark 5y ago

#2 is really quite absurd - especially here of all places - how do you decide if a product or service will never "sell out"?

12ian34 5y ago
Absurd? I'm definitely more confident that Fish/Zsh will stay free forever without changing their incentives, licensing and pricing than a YC-backed startup whose primary goal is to make money.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I generally try to avoid startups and either go for established companies (business offers are more likely to stay there and work as expected) or small bootstrapped business (cheap, more likely to stay true to their roots, do one thing well without breaking everything in the future). Startups are good for free trials as they have VC money to spend or finished deals (purchase once, consume once, forget about them).

nerdponx 5y ago

#1 I do not agree with. This is a great idea for a tool, and I am willing to pay for it. This is an extension to my terminal and a useful adjunct to my shell, not a replacement for either. #5, maybe but that's fine. Lots of things are Mac-only or Linux-only. It's a proof of concept. Moreover they appear to be working on some kind of standard specification for completion meta-data, which other tools can start to adopt and use if it turns out to be a useful spec. #2-4, it's open source (at least it looks like it's open source from the website). If the startup sells out, the project can be forked.

12ian34 5y ago
#1 That's fair. Each to their own. For me I wouldn't be willing to pay even £1 a year for it. #2-4 Firstly, just because it can be forked is not to say that it will. It's not easy to maintain a whole project in your spare time. Also, this may be a moot point since the completion engine is supposedly proprietary (as per another commenter).
jrm4 5y ago
I have found "it's open source" to be a real-life meaningless response to "I prefer tools that I am likely able to have a significant amount of autonomous control over in the future." The software market has very effectively figured out how to make things "open source" in name only (offhand, Canvas is the one that's killing me these days), and unfortunately now all such claims must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
cerved 5y ago
#5 is crucial, I highly value cross platform comparability. The existing differences are annoying enough as it is

avinassh 5y ago

Can you suggest some tools which auto suggest like Fig and work with zsh? The built in auto complete in zsh works nicely, but how do I get the drop down of all options?

elteto 5y ago
Maybe https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
vishnugupta 5y ago
This is the closest I see: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh Since switching to it from the default shell of Mac OS terminal (zsh I think) I have found it immensely productive. Some of the things it does seem Magic like auto completing uncommitted files when I say “git add <tab>”
- ttt0 5y ago
  ohmyzsh is a plugin manager for zsh, not a different shell.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
kubami 5y ago
Each needs to define an autocomplete script. oh-my-zsh provides plugins that do that for common tools like git. Those scripts are usually supplied by the CLI tool itself. For example for terraform: https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/commands/index.html#shell-tab-completion https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/commands/index.html#shell-...
lobocinza 5y ago
You need no tool at all as you can do I reverse search in any shell with ^R. If you want to do it with a better UX you can use fzf. If you want the suggestions you can use zsh-autosuggestions or fish shell. Setting them up is straightforward. And if you want an example config for Zsh you can look mine. Zinit, the package manager, automatically load/install the plugins when loading the shell. https://github.com/danisztls/dotfiles/blob/main/shell/zshrc https://github.com/danisztls/dotfiles/blob/main/shell/zshrc

zumu 5y ago

> 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? > 3. Requirement of email. > 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others. Dovetailing on these... Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing?

dvt 5y ago
Just adding, from their website: > Investors: We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives. The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know.
- meowkit 5y ago
  Eh money is trying to park itself somewhere. Maybe the founders sold this as a way to get dev telemetry data + a subscription.
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    Yeah but if there's dev telemetry involved it's a no-go from me. Definitely a no-go, the terminal is sensitive.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- arcturus17 5y ago
  WTF indeed. There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless. Casting aside the environment of low-interest rates and massive inflow of investment in startups, how does a product like this otherwise raise several millions? The pitch sounds like something that a competent indie dev studio could sell on the Mac App Store...

zzyzxd 5y ago

> 1. Cannot identify any killer features above what I already have with forever free tools with much larger support communities. It does have the features I want, although not enough to convince me to switch right now. cli can be painful if you are working on commands you are not familiar with. IMHO, this is a better interface than the ones in Fish/Zsh, that provides richer information regarding command choices, hence can be a huge improvement for discoverability. Imagine that you are not familiar with AWS EC2 and want to spin up an instance to play with. If you do that via awscli, first you need to run a bunch of `--help` commands to find the correct subcommands(`aws ec2`, and then `aws ec2 run-instances`), after that, there are 40+ flags for `run-instances`, some are mandatory, some are optional. If you do that from the web console, there's a very friendly wizard with several pages breaking down by networking, storage, OS...etc, intuitive and easy to understand.

mschrage 5y ago
The aws-cli is a monster! This exactly the type of situation where we envision Fig being really helpful :)
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  Speaking of, how did you generate the specs for the AWS cli and everything else? I wouldn't have thought that info is nicely laid out and documented somewhere.

simias 5y ago

I agree with all of your points and I probably would never use this product. That being said regarding Linux support, given the fact that Fig effectively needs to hook into your terminal emulator and your shell to drive a custom overlay, it seems like it would be a huge headache to add support for Linux given how heterogeneous the terminal setups can be on the platform. Imagine having to support urxvt running zsh on X11 and the gnome terminal running bash on Wayland or xterm running tcsh or... I think on Linux it would make more sense to directly modify one of the many existing terminal emulators to add this functionality or you'll have to severely limit the supported configurations.

mschrage 5y ago
Thanks for your insight here! We are still deciding the exact implementation, but completely agree - Linux is a challenge due to the heterogeneity of distros, window managers, compositors, etc. Our macOS approach might not work everywhere.

smsm42 5y ago

4 is a killer for me. I like the idea, I'd probably like the tool, but no way I'm installing a thing that sends out everything (or substantial part of) I type into CLI to the external server. Too much risk. I am ready to trust they mean well and make the maximum effort to make it work securely, but it's just not something I'd ever feel comfortable with.

cholojuanito 5y ago

>5. Not available for Linux, and I get the feeling that Linux would forever be an afterthought since you released for Mac first (presumably, this was driven by financial reasons). I am amazed that a CLI tool isn't made for Linux