GNU ELPA: readline-completion

readline-completion

Description: CAPF based on GNU Readline
Latest: readline-completion-0.1.tar (.sig), 2026-Nov-04, 20.0 KiB
Maintainer: Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com>
Other versions:: development version
Website: https://codeberg.org/astoff/readline-completion.el
ELPA's Repository: CGit or Gitweb
All Dependencies: compat (.tar)

To install this package from Emacs, use package-install or list-packages.

Full description

This package provides completions from GNU Readline. It can be used

in a comint buffer, to get completions from the underlying process, as you normally would in a regular terminal, or
anywhere else to get completions from Bash.

This relies on a new feature from GNU Readline 8.3, released in July 2025, so please ensure you have that version installed. Note also that this package is not compatible with programs that use alternative line-editing libraries.

Compared to related packages such as bash-completion or the "native completion" mode from the built-in Python shell, this package requires far fewer tricks and guesswork in order to trigger a completion and parse the subprocess output. In particular, it is compatible with any program that uses GNU Readline.

1. Setup

To enable the package in shell-mode as well as when reading a shell command from the minibuffer (M-&, M-x compile, etc.), add the following to your configuration:

(with-eval-after-load 'shell
  (add-hook 'shell-dynamic-complete-functions #'readline-completion-at-point))

To enable it in any other comint-mode which you know to be compatible, add readline-completion-at-point to completion-at-point-functions in a relevant mode hook. For example, for the PostgreSQL and SQLite shells:

(add-hook 'sql-interactive-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (when (memq sql-product '(postgres sqlite))
              (add-hook 'completion-at-point-functions
                        #'readline-completion-at-point
                        nil t))))

For testing, or if you prefer a dedicated keybinding for this completion source, you can call readline-completion-at-point interactively.

2. Contributing

Discussions, suggestions and code contributions are welcome! Since this package is part of GNU ELPA, contributions require a copyright assignment to the FSF.