[gmx-users] future of shell completions in GROMACS

[Mark Abraham]

Hi,

Past versions of GROMACS supported source-ing completion.* shell files from
the installation directory, so that you could do things like

grompp -f myinp

followed by a tab keypress to do UNIX-style command completion that would
correctly work out that myinputfile.mdp was an appropriate completion and
(say) myinputfile.gro was not.

For 5.0 this is going to be more tricky to support, because GROMACS usage
will change to

gmx grompp -f

so the machinery will need some updates. We plan in 5.0 to provide symlinks
to the old toolnames (where feasible), which will keep some of the old
machinery working, but so far support for tab completion for the tools as
subtools of gmx is a work in progress. In particular, the necessary
mechanism is different for different shells, and so far there's nobody
enthusiastic about supporting shells other than bash.

Some feedback here would be welcome!

Do you use this feature?
Do you use this feature with a shell other than bash?
Do you use this feature with a shell other than bash and are willing to put
some work into GROMACS to keep it working after 5.0?

Thanks!

Mark