dotnet-installer/Documentation/general/tab-completion.md

.NET CLI Tab Completion

In version 2.0 of the .NET Core CLI, we have added support for providing suggestions when you press tab. While it's not yet enabled by default, you can try it out today by installing a preview build from the master branch or by building from source.

Here are some examples of what it provides:

Input	becomes	because
dotnet a⇥	dotnet add	add is the first subcommand, alphabetically.
dotnet add p⇥	dotnet add --help	it matches substrings and --help comes first alphabetically.
dotnet add p⇥⇥	dotnet add package	pressing tab a second time brings up the next suggestion.
dotnet add package Microsoft⇥	dotnet add package Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web	results are returned alphabetically.
dotnet remove reference ⇥	dotnet remove reference ..\..\src\OmniSharp.DotNet\OmniSharp.DotNet.csproj	it is project file aware.

How to enable it

Tab completion is currently supported in three shells: PowerShell, bash, and zsh. These scripts assume that dotnet v2.0 is on your path. You can verify that you have the correct version of dotnet on your path by trying out the new complete command directly:

[04/26/2017 11:38:20] C:\
> dotnet complete "dotnet add p"

If you just installed dotnet you may see the first-run output:

Welcome to .NET Core!
---------------------
Learn more about .NET Core @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-docs. Use dotnet --help to see available commands or go to https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-docs.

Telemetry
--------------
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to improve your experience. The data is anonymous and does not include command-line arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community.
You can opt out of telemetry by setting a DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to 1 using your favorite shell.
You can read more about .NET Core tools telemetry @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry.

Configuring...
-------------------
A command is running to initially populate your local package cache, to improve restore speed and enable offline access. This command will take up to a minute to complete and will only happen once.
Decompressing 100% 4936 ms
Expanding 100% 17195 ms

You should see the following ouput (perhaps coming at the end of the first-run output). This indicates that dotnet is resolving to a v2.0 installation that supports completion.

--help
package

PowerShell

To enable tab completion in PowerShell, edit your PowerShell profile:

notepad $PROFILE

Add the contents of register-completions.ps1 to this file and save.

bash

To enable tab completion in bash, edit your .bashrc file to add the contents of register-completions.bash.

zsh

To enable tab completion in zsh, edit your .zshrc file to add the contents of register-completions.zsh.

How it works

Each of these scripts provides a hook for completions for its respective shell. The logic that determines which suggestions to provide is in the CLI itself, configured using our new parser. You can see a code example here.