How do I get autocomplete of hosts to work for an alias or function?

[devondragon]

I have a custom function which takes in a hostname argument. I would like to be able to tab-complete the hostname just like I can with ssh/rsync/scp/etc... I've tried adding the short alias to my function "wl" to the the line in the common-aliases.plugin.zsh:

zstyle -e ':completion::(ssh|scp|sftp|rsh|rsync|wl):hosts' hosts 'reply=(${=${${(f)"$(cat {/etc/ssh,~/.ssh/known_}hosts(|2)(N) /dev/null)"}%%[# ]_}//,/ })'

And tried doing the same in my .zshrc. But neither seems to work.

How can I apply the hosts completion to an arbitrary function or alias?

[apjanke]

Could you stick that code sample in triple-backquotes so we can see the exact string and it doesn't get interpreted as Markdown formatting? Some stars in there are turning things in to italics.

Like this.

[devondragon]

zstyle -e ':completion:*:(ssh|scp|sftp|rsh|rsync|wl):hosts' hosts 'reply=(${=${${(f)"$(cat {/etc/ssh_,~/.ssh/known_}hosts(|2)(N) /dev/null)"}%%[# ]*}//,/ })'

[devondragon]

I just took the line from the common-aliases.plugin.zsh which I believe provides tab completion for ssh, and added my alias "wl" to the list of commands. But that doesn't seem to actually work.

[apjanke]

Short answer: that zstyle line just customizes the manner in which zsh looks up hosts when it knows it needs them for completion. (Also, it looks like there's a typo in it, so it might not work as intended.)

To tell zsh that your function takes hosts as an argument, do this.

compdef _hosts wl

If only one of your function's arguments takes hosts, then you may want to define your own _wl() completion widget function to go along with the main wl() function that can do more context-sensitive completing.

Long answer: see the Completion System section of the Zsh Reference Manual for all the details of defining completion.

[devondragon]

Perfect! Thank you very much!!!