The CLI Team at Heroku strives to create a CLI user experience that is intuitive and productive. We had “build CLI autocomplete” in the icebox of our roadmap for many years. But if we were going to ship it, it had to complement the existing CLI experience. This is challenging because the Heroku CLI is very dynamic: it comprises user installable plugins, and the data needed for completions is behind an API.
Recently, we spent some time brainstorming the experience we wanted from Heroku CLI Autocomplete and decided it was time. We took “build autocomplete” out of the icebox and shipped it.
This post will discuss the main challenges we faced building Heroku CLI Autocomplete and how we solved...