Shell completions from nix and brew

2024-02-16

One thing that I noticed when I installed packages from nix and homebrew was the fact that I was missing zsh completions! I was looking at nix-daemon.sh and it does add some files installed to XDG_DATA_DIRS but it doesn't do anything to your shells regarding completions. Same with homebrew.

To resolve, add this before your compinit in your .zshrc:

fpath=(~/nix-profile/share/zsh/site-functions $fpath)
if type >> /dev/null; then
    HOMEBREW_PREFIX=$(brew --prefix)
    fpath=($HOMEBREW_PREFIX/share/zsh/site-functions $fpath)
fi

Man

I was curious why my man pages worked even though they don't seem to be set in MANPATH.

I realized that manpath also searches for man pages by looking in your PATH and sees if a pathname ends in /bin and looks for /share/man or /man in the same pathname. In Linux (it also uses manpath), there is also man_db.conf which does something similar with MANPATH_MAP /bin /usr/share/man, so it doesn't have to look at PATH.