I've been using nala on my debian-based computers instead of apt, mostly for the parallel downloads, but also because the UI is nicer. I have one issue, and that's the slow completions; it's not wasting painful amounts of time, but it still takes a second or two each time I hit tab. I don't know if this is the same for all shells, but I'm using zsh.
I tried a workaround, but it seems prone to breaking something. So far it's working fine for my purposes, so I thought I'd share anyway:
- I backed up
/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala
to my home directory - I copied
/usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/Debian/_apt
to/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala
- I used vim to
s/apt/nala/g
(replace every instance of 'apt' to 'nala') in the new/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_nala
Already that's sped up the completions to seemingly as fast as any other command. And already I can see some jank peaking through: zsh now thinks nala has access to apt commands that it definitely doesn't (e.g. nala build-dep
, nala changelog
and nala full-upgrade
), and it has lost autocompletions for nala fetch
and nala history
.
Once I understand completions files syntax better, I'll fix it to only use the commands listed in nala's manpage and submit a pr to the git repo. In the meantime, if anyone has suggestions for how to correct the existing completions file or more ways to make the _apt
completions fit nala, it'd be much appreciated.