Arbitrarily trigger the Fish pager?

[sagebind]

Is it possible to arbitrarily trigger the pager used in completions, either documented or undocumented? It would be useful to use the pager to make arbitrary choices interactively from scripts, perhaps by specifying a list of possible values in a similar manner as completion functions work.

[ridiculousfish]

Great idea! No, I don't think this is possible yet.

[maxnordlund]

If this happens it could be used instead of selecta or fzf, at least for small inputs, until the whole async completion happens somewhere far into the future.

[krader1961]

This capability would be useful in my mcd (menu change directory) script I just documented in issue #2847. Being able to use the fish completion pager in a manner analogous to the Korn shell select command would be extremely useful.

[faho]

Closing in favor of #4036.

[floam]

Reopened this. Looking for ideas on how people think this should work.

[floam]

For some food for though, in theory this should have been possible before. Once upon a time many moons ago the pager was a separate process, fish_pager. I think it just took command line arguments for the number of rows and columns, items, and descriptions,. It would output the selected item to some temp file or fd number or something. It was undocumented and considered very internal.

[plainas]

I believe there are these three basic building blocks to implement:

• Trigger the UI with values from the output of a command. The command could be passed as a string
• Handle interactivity. I.e. the filter mechanism. Not sure about this one. I guess in theory this could be handle by other functions. Or perhaps something like xargs -I argument ?
• capturing the output into a variable (this is more or less solved problem)

Perhaps capturing a single line only would be good for a start

I am not a an experienced user of fish scripting. More of a user that writes the occasional function to scratch his own itch. So bear with me.