Autocomplete & History

As you type a command, Cogno suggests how to finish it — from what you ran before and from built-in knowledge of more than 1000 command-line tools.

The suggestions open on their own while you type. To open them yourself, press Ctrl+Space (Control+Space on macOS).

Use it

Key	Effect
↓ / ↑	Select the next or previous suggestion
Enter	Accept the selected suggestion
Tab	Switch between all, context and history suggestions
Escape	Close

Nothing is selected at first. If you press Enter without selecting, the list closes and your command runs exactly as typed — autocomplete never changes a command behind your back.

The line under the list describes the selected suggestion and shows the active filter.

The list stays out of the way: it hides while a command is running, and after you press an arrow key on the prompt it stays hidden until you type again.

Where suggestions come from

Source	Suggests
Your commands	Commands from your history that match the input. Each one shows whether you ran it in this directory or elsewhere. Accepting it replaces the whole line.
Your patterns	Recurring command patterns found in your history
Your directories	Directories you visited before, while you type a cd command
CLI specs	Subcommands and options of 1000+ tools, plus live values such as file paths, git branches and npm scripts

The three best history matches come first, then the spec suggestions, then the rest of your history. Duplicates are merged.

Filter

Tab switches what the list shows. Your choice is remembered.

Filter	Shows
All	history and specs combined
Context	only spec suggestions
History	only your history

What gets into the history

Cogno keeps its own command history, separate from your shell’s. Only recorded commands can be suggested.

Cogno never records:

• commands the shell could not find — those are typos
• cd commands — directories are tracked separately
• empty commands, :, true and false

Keep failed commands out

By default a command is recorded whatever it exits with. To keep only commands that worked, list the allowed exit codes:

terminal.history.allowed_return_codes = [0]
terminal.history.allowed_return_codes_by_command.grep = [0, 1]

The second line makes an exception for one command: grep exits with 1 when it finds nothing, which is not a failure. The command is matched by its first word.

More history options

terminal.history.max_entries = 5000
terminal.history.ignore_commands_with_leading_space = true
terminal.history.import_shell_history = true

• max_entries caps the history; the default is unlimited.
• ignore_commands_with_leading_space skips commands typed with a leading space, as HISTCONTROL=ignorespace does in Bash.
• import_shell_history fills an empty Cogno history from your shell’s history file on first launch.

Settings

• terminal.history.* — everything about the recorded history
• autocomplete.provider.timeout_ms — how long Cogno waits for live values such as git branches

Both actions can be rebound: trigger_autocomplete and cycle_tab, see Keybindings.