How-to guide

Set up completions and the man page

Have your shell complete aless's options and their values, and man show its manual page, however you installed aless.

aless carries its own manual page and completions for bash, zsh, fish and PowerShell. Homebrew installs them for you; with any other install, aless prints them.

After a Homebrew install #

The formula puts each file where Homebrew keeps them, so all that is left is for your shell to look there. Homebrew's shell completion guide has the steps for each shell: for zsh, eval "$(brew shellenv)" has to run before compinit. man aless works as soon as the formula is installed.

Load the completions as the shell starts #

Add one line to your shell's startup file:

eval "$(aless --generate complete-bash)"     # ~/.bashrc
eval "$(aless --generate complete-zsh)"      # ~/.zshrc, after compinit
aless --generate complete-fish | source      # ~/.config/fish/config.fish

In PowerShell, add them to your profile once:

aless --generate complete-powershell | Add-Content $PROFILE

The completions know every option and the values each one takes: the formats --kind reads and --render writes, the modes, and a file where an option wants one.

Or save them where the shell looks #

Write each file once instead:

aless --generate complete-bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/aless
aless --generate complete-zsh > ~/.zfunc/_aless          # a directory on $fpath
aless --generate complete-fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/aless.fish

A saved file is read without running aless as the shell starts. Write it again when you upgrade aless, since a release can add options.

The man page #

Save it where man looks for your own pages:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/man/man1
aless --generate man > ~/.local/share/man/man1/aless.1
man aless

If your man does not search ~/.local/share/man, add it to MANPATH. The manual page holds the same reference as aless --help, and as this site's command line reference.