Jay's blog

Homebrew Shell Completion Is Worth Your Time

Original art, nautilus shell

I finally gave the Auth0 command line tool a try yesterday at work. I installed it via Homebrew since I use a MacBook Pro at work. I was hoping I could use it to quickly automate a repetitive task using a shell script. Unfortunately, Auth0's tool isn't currently able to block user accounts.1

I noticed that their tool had a way to output a shell completion configuration. That led me down a rabbit hole, revealing that lots of tools I've installed via Homebrew ship with shell completions! They just aren't being used by default.

I'm not going to repeat the instructions here because Homebrew has a webpage with concise yet detailed instructions for adding shell completions to your configuration.

It's worth your time to set this up. Shell completions are a super power. I'm much less productive if I don't have git shell completions available.

I will note that setting this up for zsh, now the default shell in MacOS, is the most involved of all the supported shells. It's worth the 5 minute investment, though.


  1. I opened a feature ticket.

#MacOS #homebrew