Why is there no tool/search function for getting prompts while searching up terminal commands?

[heady heart]

The title. I have been searching for a tool that'll help with my terminal commands like if I type

"Regex", I want the tool to be able to show me all the commands that uses regular expressions as input.

Is there something like that?

[visual plank]

you mean auto suggestion like in fish?

[heady heart]

Not just that.

When you type in ">something" in VS code, it'll show the relevant settings and functions that exist with that word.

Is there nothing like that? I'm tired of having to search online

[silk willow]

Doesn't a single tab work for that?

I don't know if it's specific to certain shells

I use zsh, if I type the beginning of a command and press tab it will show every command that begin with the part I typed

That's not as powerful as what you want, but still similar

[visual plank]

tldr? Also what chara said yeah
i dont think you can go much further than that

[silk willow]

Another way would be to show every commands and grep an expression in it

[heady heart]

Is it possible to use grep on command line manual?

[silk willow]

From what I remember yes

[deep vortex]

Press tab?

Tab will autocomplete a lot of things, if they exist

Ah that was already said lol, but I think that is what you want really

[silk willow]

I'm pretty sure they want to find an expression contained in a command, not completion

[deep vortex]

Ah, sounds fancy 🤔

[heady heart]

Like atleast to show relevant commands so I can next look at manual of those

[deep vortex]

Sounds what you're looking for some kind of typing system on the commands and their arguments

That's not a thing, everything on the commandline are just strings

I'm not sure how you could determine between a regex string or a normal string

[heady heart]

Ok found it

It's called apropos

This makes the most sense to me

Credit to The Linux Command Line book

[deep vortex]

I wondered about apropos but it wasn't very useful when I tried it

grep, sed, awk, and even pacman accept regex, none of which turn up there

Expanding the search to "regular expression" fills my terminal with garbage

[heady heart]

Ohh

I'll try to use ble.sh

[heady heart]

Got it

[deep vortex]

I think what you really need is some kind of metadata database, like

{
  "sed" : {
    "features": ["regex", "text manipulation", "other features sed has"]
  },
  "grep" : { 
    "features": ["regex", "text filtering", "blah blah blah"]
  },
  // etc etc
}
``` then you could `metadataSearch regex` and it'd spit out "sed" and "grep"

To my knowledge that doesn't exist. I wondered if tldr would have that info but sadly not

Might be a useful little tool if you fancy a project 😄

[heady heart]

I do fancy a project! But I'm still learning to code and use the terminal so 😅

Some kind of a natural language processing that can interpret the input different ways and categorise them based on that?

[cyan dock]

theres also howdoi

used to use it when i was newer https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

[surreal canyon]

just use fish and configure autocompletions in the config folder, many programs come with fish autocompletions too, as for a manual just use curl cht.sh/command-name and tldr command from the terminal, this is as far as you can go really, other stuff will just fill ur terminal with nonsense, look at cht.sh especially its very good since it aggregates documentation from many sources and needs just curl

[heady heart]

I will try this. Thanks