Tab-completion for Mercurial in Bash?

Question

Using Subversion on the command-line, it intelligently tab-completes available subcommands, etc:

$ svn c<tab>
cat         checkout    cl          co          copy        
changelist  ci          cleanup     commit      cp  

Mercurial, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have tab-completion, at least out of the box:

$ hg c<tab> 
[nothing happens]

Is Bash completion for Mercurial available at all? What's the simplest way to get it working? I'm on Ubuntu 11.04.

Answer 1

Mercurial ships it's own bash completion - see contrib/bash_completion in the tarball. At least on openSUSE, this file is installed to /etc/bash_completion.d/, so that bash completion for mercurial is working automatically. You might need to check Ubuntu's mercurial package, if it installs the completion script.

Answer 2

I built mercurial from a source release and had to install the completion script myself. This is how to do this:

$ cd
$ wget http://selenic.com/hg/raw-file/25e4d2f35965/contrib/bash_completion -P opt/packages/mercurial
$ echo ". opt/packages/mercurial/bash_completion" >> .bashrc
$ . opt/packages/mercurial/bash_completion

Completion is ON.

Answer 3

In Ubuntu 10.04 it works out of the box for me. In bash:

$ hg c
cat       checkout  clone     commit    copy

Or in zsh:

$ hg c
cat       checkout  ci        clone     co        commit    copy      cp

Perhaps you have a package missing (or you hit a bug).

On my system the completion file is provided by the mercurial package:

$ dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion.d/mercurial 
mercurial: /etc/bash_completion.d/mercurial