gnaw

Enable shell completion

gnaw ships dynamic shell completion: tab-complete flags, their enum values (--secret-scan <TAB> → off warn redact block), built-in template names, and file paths. There's no static script to install or regenerate — the binary emits the completion hook itself when your shell asks for it.

Turn it on

Source the hook from your shell's startup file so every new shell picks it up.

# ~/.config/fish/config.fish
if command -q gnaw
    COMPLETE=fish gnaw | source
end
# ~/.zshrc
source <(COMPLETE=zsh gnaw)
# ~/.bashrc
source <(COMPLETE=bash gnaw)

Reload your shell (open a new terminal, or exec fish / exec zsh / exec bash) and try it:

gnaw --secret-scan <TAB>     # off  warn  redact  block
gnaw --compress <TAB>        # light  moderate  full
gnaw -t <TAB>                # built-in template names, with descriptions
gnaw --encoding <TAB>        # cl100k  p50k  p50k_edit  r50k  o200k

How it works (and why one detail matters)

The hook re-invokes gnaw with a COMPLETE environment variable each time your shell needs candidates, so completion always reflects the installed binary — no stale generated script. Two consequences:

  • gnaw must be on your PATH. If you installed with cargo install --path crates/gnaw-ctx, it lives in ~/.cargo/bin, which is normally already on PATH. Completion fires for the bare command gnaw, not for ./target/debug/gnaw or other paths.
  • Re-source after upgrading gnaw. The shell↔binary completion protocol can change between releases, so refresh the hook (open a new shell) when you update.

Dynamic candidates

Beyond flags and enums, gnaw completes two things at runtime:

  • --template offers every built-in template name (claude-xml, chatgpt-markdown, gemini, the task templates, …) with each one's description shown alongside, and still falls back to file-path completion for custom templates.
  • --compress-strip completes the strip tokens (tests, fn-bodies, doc-comments, private-bodies) and their no- negations.

Path arguments (the directory to analyze, -O, -t) use your shell's native file completion.