Lazyweb, Lazyweb: Commandline hinting

The geeks out there who use commandline on a popular set of operating systems (linux) may or may not know about bash_completion. bash_completion is awesome, it adds more tabbing to your typing. You type ssh <tab> <tab> and it starts suggesting what you might want to type, like hosts, or switches. It autocompletes when it can, and it makes life very easy. To the non-geek this translates into very efficient commandlines, and that is why geeks dig the commandline. I always thought bash_completion was awesome, but lacking a critical feature. bash_completion doesn't work for programs it doesn't know about. This is logical, because, how can it. So I propose, oh lazyweb, that we agree upon a switch like --hint for all commandline apps which spits out it's help in a form that an add on like bash completion can easily use, so even if bash_completion doesn't know about it, it can find out about it as you tab. It would allow richer things like this:

yourhost$ ls -l <tab> <tab> 
       -l     use a long listing format
       Other Suggestions: ...

It would mean that everyone@opensource would need to figure out and agree upon a standard, but it would mean implementing hinting under different shells would be trivial to implement, and the problem gets farmed out to everyone who maintains their own packages, so hopefully we would see wider support.

It is just a rad geek dream, really. A lot like my tab completion IRC/IM/Blogging dream (the one where you hit a <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> and it tells your friend what you want to say, without having to type it all out).

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