townx

I find the command completion tools in a shell indispensable (i.e. when you press Tab to complete a path or show you the options for a command - this works for svn, for example). Plus I get quite annoyed when they don't work for a command I'm using. I found out today it is pretty easy to add your own completions using the complete command (at least, when using Bash under Linux).

So here, for example, is how to get Rake to auto-complete with the names of the tasks in your Rake file:

complete -W "$(rake -T | awk 'NR != 1 {print $2}')" rake

It's not flawless, but it's a damn sight better than having to do rake -T and scrolling through a wordy list. NB this only works if you run the complete command in a directory where you have a Rake file to start with. There's probably some switch to complete which dynamically generates the completions when you try to use them: I need to investigate.

You could also try something like this to put up a list of names of hosts in your /etc/hosts file when you're using SSH:

complete -W "$(cat /etc/hosts | awk '$1 != "#" {print $2}')" ssh

You can just add these to your Bash profile to get them activated when starting a new shell, I imagine.