On September 17, 2021 San Francisco based developer Brendan Falk announced general availability of Fig, which adds VSCode-style autocomplete to your existing terminal.
The terminal has barely changed since the 1970s and yet is still used every day by tens of millions of developers. It looks like the terminal isn’t going away any time soon and Fig wants to play a part in its evolution.
What is Fig?
Fig makes the terminal easier for beginners, more productive for advanced engineers, and more collaborative for teams.
To do this Fig is creating the app ecosystem for the terminal. They’ve built out a simple Javascript API (Fig.js) that makes it easy to extend your local terminal & shell with visual apps and shortcuts.
The first app built on top of the Fig platform is autocomplete. They soon will open up their API so anyone can create their own apps.
Fig Autocomplete
The first app, autocomplete, is a modern IntelliSense for your interactive shell. We support inline completions for subcommands, options, and arguments for 200+ CLI tools.
Fig makes it ridiculously easy to build completions. They’ve defined a declarative standard that makes building completions for things like git checkout <branch> or npm install <package> around 10 lines of Javascript. All of their completions are open source in their public GitHub repo (withfig/autocomplete) and have been built by 120+ contributors!
Autocomplete is built to be extensible. You can add your own personal shortcuts, add project-specific shortcuts, customize descriptions for package.json scripts, and even build completions for your team’s internal CLI tool. You can build all this and more by checking out our docs.
Here’s what autocomplete looks like in action.
If you want to learn more about the fig.js API and future apps, please visit the original blog post linked below.
Credits
- Picture courtesy of Mali Bou
- This article was first published on fig.io/blog
