help creating an autocompleter?

[JeffMelton]

I have a local database with an inventory of Kubernetes clusters. I can produce a list of cluster IDs with:

duckdb -list -noheader -c "SELECT cluster_id FROM inventory WHERE environment='prod';" ./inventory.db

My team uses a custom binary for authentication to these clusters, and I'd like to set up an autocompleter to fuzzy match cluster ID, something like:

connect_binary 1234[tab]

That should return us12345-prod, gb01234-prod, etc. From the docs, it looks like I want something like

autocomplete set connect_binary %[{
    Dynamic: '{
        duckdb -list -noheader -c "SELECT cluster_id FROM inventory WHERE environment='prod';" ./inventory.db
    }'
}]

But I haven't been able to piece together quite enough yet to get it working. From the above, I get:

There were problems loading profile `/Users/j0m0aam/.murex_profile`:
unexpected object value:
* new keys should follow a comma, or new line.
* objects should be terminated with a closing curly bracket '}'
* barewords cannot include whitespace
Expression: autocomplete set test %[{     Dynamic: '{         duckdb -list -noheader -c "SELECT cluster_id FROM inventory WHERE environment='prod';" ./inventory.db     }' }]  function mudlarking_dev {     
          :                                                                                                                                     ^
Character : 132

I expect I'm missing a few things here, but I'd appreciate any and all suggestions. TIA! 🙏🏽

[JeffMelton]

I've made a bit of progress. This will return the entire list of cluster IDs:

autocomplete set connect_binary %[{
    Dynamic: %({duckdb -noheader -list -c "select cluster_id from inventory;" ~/inventory.db})
}]

I haven't managed yet to filter the list with the text from stdin. The docs mention that a PREFIX variable gets set with Dynamic, but I haven't figured out yet how to use that. For instance, if I try to -> match $PREFIX inside that Dynamic block, Murex throws an error on initialization that says the PREFIX variable doesn't exist. If I try to -> match <stdin>, the completion doesn't fire at all.

EDIT:
I see now: The code above actually does work, but autocomplete doesn't fuzzy-match. It's prefix-only. Is there any way to pass stdin into the Dynamic block as a variable to use with my select statement?

[lmorg]

doesn't fuzzy-match. It's prefix-only.

tab completetion is prefix-only. But if you press ctrl+f then you do get a kind-of fuzzy match:
https://murex.rocks/user-guide/terminal-keys.html#fuzzy-find-autocomplete

It's not "proper" fuzzy find because you wouldn't get misspellings et al matched. But it is still a hell of a lot more useful than prefix matching for times when you're not really sure what you're looking for

Is there any way to pass stdin into the Dynamic block as a variable to use with my select statement?

I'm not really certain what you're asking for here, but there are ways to pass values to stdin. eg

autocomplete set example %[{
    Dynamic: '{ $PARAMS[1] -> tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" }'
}]

or you could separate that into it's own function, if you wanted to test it outside of autocomplete. eg

private autocomplete.example {
    $PARAMS[1] -> tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"
}

autocomplete set example %[{
    Dynamic: '{ autocomplete.example @PARAMS }'
}]

and test with:

» fexec private [package/module]/autocomplete.example [parameters]

Appologies if this isn't what you meant.

[JeffMelton]

Thanks, I'd forgotten that ctrl-f works in autocomplete as well. It's less about not knowing what I'm looking for than it is about saving keystrokes. Our cluster IDs are zero-padded, and the vast majority of them start with us. With the completer I wrote for my Elvish config, I can type 1234<tab> and get us01234-prod. I can retrain muscle memory to start with ctrl-f instead of tab, though.

Sorry for not explaining well what I was asking about using stdin. Examples:

# This works interactively, but not with the autocompleter.
function get_cluster_ids {
    duckdb -noheader -list -c "select cluster_id from inventory;" inventory.db -> match @PARAMS

    # This throws an error when the shell initializes.
    # duckdb -noheader -list -c "select cluster_id from inventory;" inventory.db -> match $PARAMS[1]

    # This also works interactively but not as an autocompleter — all my attempts to interpolate a variable into that SQL statement 
    # throw errors when Murex initializes. Whether that's because I haven't managed to properly escape it, I don't know
    # duckdb -noheader -list -c %(select cluster_id from inventory where cluster_id like '%1234%';) inventory.db 
}

# The autocompleter never fires here when I hit tab or ctrl-f, but if I remove `@PARAMS` it works as expected.
autocomplete set connect_binary %[{
    Dynamic: '{
        get_cluster_ids @PARAMS
    }'
}]

I thought interactive testing would validate my autocomplete code blocks, but that seems not to be the case. I'm also not sure how to use the examples you gave above — should I be able to use them interactively as-is? or should I be replacing, e.g., [package/module] and/or [parameters] with something?

Thanks again for your help! 🙂

[lmorg]

It's less about not knowing what I'm looking for than it is about saving keystrokes. Our cluster IDs are zero-padded, and the vast majority of them start with us

Ahhhh I understand. Forcing a non-prefixed match would definitely be preferable then.

You could try IgnorePrefix, which was added to solve a similar problem:

• Docs: https://murex.rocks/commands/autocomplete.html#ignoreprefix
• Conversation: autojump with jump - need help #635

I suspect this also isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it would be trivial to add another directive to match a substring instead of a prefix (behind the scenes, IgnorePrefix already implements the hard stuff for adding a substring match).

I thought interactive testing would validate my autocomplete code blocks, but that seems not to be the case. I'm also not sure how to use the examples you gave above — should I be able to use them interactively as-is? or should I be replacing, e.g., [package/module] and/or [parameters] with something?

• [package/module]: this would be whatever package name you've given your code. You can just press [tab] in the command line and you'll get suggestions.
• [parameters]: whatever parameters you want to pass to your function

You could also change private (docs)to function (docs) in the earlier example if you wanted to save yourself the trouble of running fexec

I can talk more about modules later when you've got this working, if you'd like?

[JeffMelton]

Ok, thank you. You are correct that IgnorePrefix also doesn't isn't what I'm looking for. I've implemented a solution using fzf for now.

I realized recently that one of the things that was holding me back from realizing the full potential of Murex was that I kept trying to shoehorn in external tools and old workflows instead of taking advantage of all the work you've done to make it a fully functional toolkit on its own. Having already moved away from a heavy shell config to a dozen or so binaries and couple of scripts that cover the same territory in a (mostly) shell-agnostic way, I picked up where I left off several months ago and am getting much better results. 😄

All that to say I'd love to be able implement a native autocomplete solution that serves the same purpose as my fzf workaround does, so if you'll take it as a feature request to match on substrings instead of just prefixes, I'd appreciate it!

[lmorg]

That sounds like an excellent idea for a new feature.