I replaced the AWS CLI completer with a datalake

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0500

I needed to tell someone in Italy my availability in their timezone, typed TZ= and hit tab, and discovered a completer that’s apparently been sitting in zsh since the Pleistocene. That made me finally look at how completion actually works: #compdef, the dispatch table, _files, the whole vocabulary kit I’d been leaning on for years without really seeing. And in the middle of that I remembered the thing that had made me write off tab completion in the first place: aws_completer, the Python-spawning hog that claims every argument position and still makes a mockery of my left pinky finger when it innocently asks for a filename, interrupting to say: but wait, are you sure you don’t want to marry one of my 428 eligible daughters first?

I was wrong about shell completions for 15 years

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:00:00 -0500

I thought shell completions were tab-operated Jinja — fill in the blank, template-style. Type half a filename, press tab, get the rest. That’s all I thought they did.

And the AWS CLI completer kept confirming that impression in the worst way. When you’re typing aws s3 cp somefile.txt s3://bucket/, the completer hijacks tab on the local path argument and sits there forever trying to guess AWS-side completions that will never come. You’re done with the AWS part of the command. You just want to tab-complete a filename. It won’t let you. AWS hogs the empty space where your possibilities want to go, because it thinks it’s important to block your progress in case you wanted to speak to any of its 867 pet names. As John Roderick and Merlin Mann put it on Roderick on the Line: keep moving and get out of the way.

Zsh on ferkakta.dev

I replaced the AWS CLI completer with a datalake

I was wrong about shell completions for 15 years