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shtab

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  • What: Automatically generate shell tab completion scripts for Python CLI apps

  • Why: Speed & correctness. Alternatives like argcomplete and pyzshcomplete are slow and have side-effects

  • How: shtab processes an argparse.ArgumentParser object to generate a tab completion script for your shell

Features

  • Outputs tab completion scripts for multiple shells

    • bash, zsh, fish, tcsh

  • Supports

  • <arguments>, --options and sub commands

  • Choices (--say={hello,goodbye}`)

  • Paths (--file={*.y*ml,*.toml}, --dir=*/)

  • Dynamic shell commands (--branch=$(git branch))

Installation

Choose one of:

  • pip install shtab, or

  • conda install -c conda-forge shtab

See operating system-specific instructions in the docs.

Usage

There are two ways of using shtab:

  • CLI Usage: shtab’s own CLI interface for external applications

    • may not require any code modifications whatsoever

    • end-users execute shtab your_cli_app.your_parser_object

  • Library Usage: as a library integrated into your CLI application

    • adds a couple of lines to your application

    • argument mode: end-users execute your_cli_app --print-completion {bash,zsh,tcsh,fish}

    • subparser mode: end-users execute your_cli_app completion {bash,zsh,tcsh,fish}

Examples

See the docs for usage examples.

FAQs

Not working? Check out frequently asked questions.

Alternatives

  • argcomplete

    • executes the underlying script every time <TAB> is pressed (slow and has side-effects)

  • pyzshcomplete

    • executes the underlying script every time <TAB> is pressed (slow and has side-effects)

    • only provides zsh completion

  • click

    • different framework completely replacing the builtin argparse

    • solves multiple problems (rather than POSIX-style “do one thing well”)

Contributions

Please do open issues & pull requests! Some ideas:

  • support powershell (#212)

  • support python -m prefix (#55)

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more guidance.

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Project links

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  • Released:
Latest release

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Credits

Author: Casper da Costa-Luis

Maintainer: tqdm developers

GitHub Statistics

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 15, 2026
The GitHub source repository was provided by the project maintainers and verified by PyPI at the time of upload. Stars, forks, and open issues/PRs are derived from that repository and have not been independently verified.

License

MPL-2.0

Requires

Python >=3.9

Provides Extra

dev

Tags

tab completion shell bash zsh tcsh fish argparse

Classifiers

Report project as malware

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