Add information on using the native shell completions in .NET 10+

[baronfel]

Type of issue

Typo

Description

This page needs content about the new built-in tab completion scripts for shells: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/10.0/preview/preview3/sdk.md#native-shell-completion-scripts

We should lean into these over the older, dynamic completions as they are much faster.

> dotnet completions generate [SHELL]
... lots of shell-specific script emitted here...

The shell argument is one of the following shell names:

• bash
• fish
• nushell
• pwsh
• zsh

If no shell is specified, we will try to infer the correct shell from the current execution environment -

• if Windows, default to pwsh
• otherwise, see if the file name of the SHELL environment variable matches any of the shells above

Capabilities

The primary reason to do this is speed. Native shell completions are much faster than dynamic, dotnet-provided completions.

We have differing levels of support/capabilities for each shell in this release:

hybrid means that we generate shell-specific shims that are fast for the 'static' parts of the CLI grammar, but for dynamic parts of the grammar (NuGet Package Ids, etc) we ask the dotnet CLI for dynamic completions

dynamic means that all completions go through the full dotnet CLI, so completions may be slower

shell	completion type	support for descriptions in tab completions
bash	hybrid	no
fish	dynamic	no
nushell	dynamic	no
powershell	hybrid	yes
zsh	hybrid	yes

We'll want to document shell-specific examples of including these generation+registration scripts in each shell's equivalent of the $PROFILE.

For example, for powershell this might look something like adding this to your $PROFILE:

dotnet completions script pwsh | out-String | Invoke-Expression -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Page URL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/enable-tab-autocomplete

Content source URL

https://github.com/dotnet/docs/blob/main/docs/core/tools/enable-tab-autocomplete.md

Document Version Independent Id

f30f63dc-0d90-7dba-ef39-b0148c637c1a

Platform Id

d808fba8-f906-9fc9-f8fd-8fe8bca5bdf8

Article author

@adegeo

Metadata

• ID: 341f0255-aa31-8e76-9b17-1232b7a910a9
• PlatformId: d808fba8-f906-9fc9-f8fd-8fe8bca5bdf8
• Service: dotnet-fundamentals

Related Issues

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Associated WorkItem - 498950

[adegeo]

@baronfel Thank you for the heads up. I'll prioritize this closer to Oct.

[baronfel]

@adegeo np at all, and of course I'm happy to help with the content and examples. I'm just trying to make sure I've got issues logged for all the wonderful new SDK features coming in 10 :)

[baronfel]

@adegeo this one is a dupe of #45549 (Because I'm bad at searching). The other one has more ready-to-go detail. Should we close this one and you pick up the other instead?

[adegeo]

Migrated the details to this one.