On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 5:20 AM, Aaron Schrab [off-list ref] wrote:

At 17:24 +0200 08 May 2018, Duy Nguyen [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

It took me so long to reply partly because I remember seeing some guy
doing clever trick with tab completion that also shows a short help
text in addition to the complete words. I could not find that again
and from my reading (also internet searching) it's probably not
possible to do this without trickery.

Was that perhaps using zsh rather than bash? Below is some of the display
from its git completion (this is likely affected somewhat by my
configuration).  The group descriptions (lines that begin with "Completing")
appear in a different color, and are not available for selection.

Ah. That's probably it.

1113$ git c<tab>
Completing alias
ci               -- alias for 'commit -v'
cia              -- alias for 'commit -v -a'
co               -- alias for 'checkout'
conf             -- alias for 'config'
Completing main porcelain command
checkout         -- checkout branch or paths to working tree
cherry-pick      -- apply changes introduced by some existing commits
citool           -- graphical alternative to git commit
clean            -- remove untracked files from working tree
clone            -- clone repository into new directory
commit           -- record changes to repository
Completing ancillary manipulator command
config           -- get and set repository or global options
Completing ancillary interrogator command
cherry           -- find commits not merged upstream
count-objects    -- count unpacked objects and display their disk
consumption
Completing plumbing manipulator command
checkout-index   -- copy files from index to working directory
commit-tree      -- create new commit object
Completing plumbing interrogator command
cat-file         -- provide content or type information for repository
objects

It's interesting that zsh could do this. I looked at the script and
these texts are hard coded in there. I don't use zsh myself and won't
be doing this, but this information should be now available from git
binary so you can lower maintenance cost for the zsh completion
script.

1114$ git commit -<tab>
Completing option
--all                  -a       -- stage all modified and deleted paths
--allow-empty                   -- allow recording an empty commit
--allow-empty-message           -- allow recording a commit with an empty
message
--amend                         -- amend the tip of the current branch
--author                        -- override the author name used in the
commit

Hm.. no idea where this is from. Maybe zsh can extract "git <command>
-h"? Anyway it does not matter.
-- 
Duy