[FEAT] AutoComplete widget

[TomJGooding]

I can't see anything on the roadmap, so are there plans to add a AutoComplete widget to Textual?

The terms get a bit confusing, but by autocomplete I mean a dynamic dropdown list, like you see pretty much everywhere.

Textual already has a Select widget, Input and now a Command Palette, so it might surprise people that there isn't a widget for this (I am aware of other libraries)

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[davep]

Like https://github.com/darrenburns/textual-autocomplete?

[TomJGooding]

Yes something like lextual-autocomplete. Are there plans to add a widget like this to Textual?

(I am aware of this project and obviously Darren's involvement with Textual, which I hope doesn't make this feature request awkward)

[willmcgugan]

We were just discussing that today. I think there should be an autocomplete in the core lib.

[TomJGooding]

Thanks Will. That's a bit spooky, I really do spend too much time here if I'm somehow picking up your internal discussions...!

[willmcgugan]

@davep please sweep the office for bugs.

[davep]

Live scenes from the sweep...

[TomJGooding]

The core functionality of an AutoComplete widget seems to have already been worked out in the command palette.

I confess I don't fully understand the code yet so perhaps this is naive, but couldn't a good chunk be extracted to this new AutoComplete widget (then used to derive the command palette)?

I did spend some time experimenting with this idea, but got a bit stuck understanding the command provider.

[willmcgugan]

I think @darrenburns 's textual-autocomplete may become the officially recommended solution.

[mikerapa]

I can't get the textual-autocomplete examples to work.

[antoniorodr]

Hello!

I need some help here (using textual-autocomplete), because if I understand correctly I do need to create a subclass of AutoComplete (or PathAutoComplete, I am not sure what it will suits better) to cover my needs.

I am working on an autocompletion function for my project. In the input field, the user will write a complex string like:

rsync -avz /var/www/ user@backupserver:/backups/www/
find /var/log -type f -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -delete
find /var/log -type f -name "*.log" | xargs grep "error" | sort | uniq > ~/error_summary.txt

What I want is to give them path autocompletion when they are writing a path (it could be just one or multiple paths), but ignore the rest of the string.

I tried using regex, but it did not quite works.

Does anyone have any ideas or tips to point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

[antoniorodr]

Hi @Zaloog

I am not really sure. It may be more than one path in the string, and when the user accepts the autocompletion it should not replace the whole string, but only the last path.

Ive been trying since yesterday, and I am so frustrated 🤣

[Zaloog]

You can handle the autocomplete behavior after accepting as well.
I did some custom stuff in my ayu project, but not particular the use case you needed

[antoniorodr]

Okey, I will try again then. I do not want to disturb you more than needed.

I assume you created a class from AutoComplete. Or from PathAutoComplete?

[Zaloog]

@antoniorodr

https://github.com/Zaloog/ayu/blob/main/src/ayu/widgets/modals/search.py

I just used autocomplete, but i think it should also work with PathAutoComplete

[antoniorodr]

@Zaloog

I will definitely take a look.

Thanks a lot!