Enabling Intelligent Tab Completion in Zsh without High Memory Usage

Over the last few years, exciting user interface ideas have come on the scene for terminals like Fig and Warp. These tools provide great initial development experiences. However, after dealing with high memory usage which slows down other areas of software engineering workflows, I found myself asking, 'Is there a way I can get similar functionality without the bloat?'

TL;DR

There is! By using a few zsh plugins, you can get a lightweight intelligent completion setup. Read more to consider if this setup might benefit your workflow if you use a mac and zsh.

Brief Overview of Tools

Warp and Fig, and now Amazon Q Developer, provide intelligent completion in your terminal by providing suggestions and completion based on current context. Warp, provides a terminal experience redefined with incorporated ai, autocomplete and fresh UI. Fig is more traditional out of the box with some similar features. However, I found these tools to increase memory usage significantly.

Why I chose the approach I did

Between terminal experiences the use lots of memory and infrastructure processes that run on my machine that do the same, it's important for me to consider how I allocate CPU and memory. Perhaps I could go into more detail on this in a later post. However, for now, here's a quick overview of how I set up my terminal to provide intelligent completion without the bloat.

How I set it up

I removed fig and warp and installed the following plugins.

  • zoxide: a fast path history tool,
  • fzf: a favorite terminal fuzzy finder, zsh-autosuggestions: auto-suggestions based on terminal commands
  • fzf-tab: a tab/dropdown-like developer experience which feels similar to fig and warp:
  • zsh-syntax-highlighting: a tool that highlights commands as you type them

fzf-tab is the star of the show on for this functionality. Setting it up took some work for me.

I had to configuration the ui which is mostly (if not all copy/pasted from the docs):

  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:cd:*' fzf-preview 'eza -1 --color=always $realpath'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:git-(add|diff|restore):*' fzf-preview 'git diff $word | delta'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:git-log:*' fzf-preview 'git log --color=always $word'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:git-help:*' fzf-preview 'git help $word | bat -plman --color=always'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:git-show:*' fzf-preview 'case "$group" in "commit tag") git show --color=always $word ;; *) git show --color=always $word | delta ;; esac'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:git-checkout:*' fzf-preview 'case "$group" in "modified file") git diff $word | delta ;; "recent commit object name") git show --color=always $word | delta ;; *) git log --color=always $word ;; esac'
  zstyle ':completion:*:git-checkout:*' sort false
  zstyle ':completion:*:descriptions' format '[%d]'
  zstyle ':completion:*' list-colors ${(s.:.)LS_COLORS}
  zstyle ':completion:*' menu no
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:complete:cd:*' fzf-preview 'eza -1 --color=always $realpath'
  zstyle ':fzf-tab:*' switch-group '<' '>'
  zstyle ':completion:*' list-max-items 20

I also added more configuration as recommended in the docs with fzf-tab-source:

  eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"
  source  $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/fzf-tab-source/fzf-tab-source.plugin.zsh
  enable-fzf-tab

Conclusion

With these plugins, I have a lightweight intelligent completion setup that doesn't slow down my machine. It didn't take long to setup and the results have been great.

fzf tab in practice