The sbtc client can provide a ux very similar to using the sbt shell
when combined with tab completions. In fact, since some shells have a
better tab completion engine than that provided by jilne2, the
experience can be even better. To make this work, we add another entry
point to the thin client that is capable of generating completions for
an input string. It queries sbt for the completions and prints the
result to stdout, where they are consumed by the shell and fed into its
completion engine.
In addition to providing tab completions, if there is no server running
or if the user is completing `runMain`, `testOnly` or `testQuick`, the
thin client will prompt the user to ask if they would like to start an
sbt server or if they would like to compile to generate the main class
or test names. Neither powershell nor zsh support forwarding input to
the tab completion script. Zsh will print output to stderr so we
opportunistically start the server or complete the test class names.
Powershell does not print completion output at all, so we do not start a
server or fill completions in that case*. For fish and bash, we prompt
the user that they can take these actions so that they can avoid the
expensive operation if desired.
* Powershell users can set the environment variable SBTC_AUTO_COMPLETE
if they want to automatically start a server of compile for run and test
names. No output will be displayed so there can be a long latency
between pressing <tab> and seeing completion results if this variable is
set.
Adrien Piquerez
Ethan Atkins
Eugene Yokota