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Show HN: Shellock, a real-time CLI flag explainer for fish shell

I just tried it out, nice! It's a useful tool, but the installation process didn't work for me following the steps as written. As it stands:

* The shellock directory must be in ~/Downloads, otherwise the shellock_bindings.fish fails to source it.

* The installation script in the repo didn't work because it tried to symlink shellock_bindings.fish without specifying an absolute path (`~/.config/fish/conf.d/shellock_bindings.fish -> ./shellock_bindings.fish`) -> caused a recursive symlink which broke.

Now I got it working by making sure to place shellock in Downloads (not ideal long term, I often clear my Downloads folder), and manually symlinking the bindings explicitly. It seems to work pretty well!

3 hours agoj4cobgarby

Playing around with a bit more, I think the tool might not be suitable for my use cases. If I try it with the command `gcc -Wall` it thinks that each of W, a, l, (and l), are separate single-character arguments, and therefore fails badly:

``` > gcc -Wall -W Unknown flag -a Unknown flag -l Search the library named library when linking. (The second alternative with the library as a separate argument is only for POSIX compliance and is not recom... ```

Additionally, it is really slow, I suppose because gcc has a huge man page? It is really useful for lots of small commands like ls and find, and things where I often forget parameters. Maybe it could be changed so that I can whitelist only certain commands to trigger the hints?

3 hours agoj4cobgarby

Looks like a cool idea - what does it do with more complicated commands, e.g. two commands with a pipe? Does it pick the last part of the pipe?

an hour agoelcapitan

Nice, I tried looking for something like this but never found anything. Glad to see someone working on it.

3 hours agowitherk

I read the title too quickly and thought that 12 years later shellshock was making a come back!

an hour agoTacticalCoder

Cool! Recommendations for something similar on zsh?