The completions still dont work because they are generated for fd and not fdfind.

I can only think of changing the symlinks in create-deb.sh to something like:

ln -sf "/usr/bin/fd" "${DPKG_DIR}/usr/bin/fdfind"

"${DPKG_DIR}/usr/bin/fdfind" --gen-completions bash > autocomplete/fdfind.bash
"${DPKG_DIR}/usr/bin/fdfind" --gen-completions fish > autocomplete/fdfind.fish
"${DPKG_DIR}/usr/bin/fdfind" --gen-completions powershell > autocomplete/_fdfind.ps1
# Generate Zsh completion by substituting top row of static completion file
sed '1s/^#compdef fd/#compdef fdfind/' autocomplete/_fd > autocomplete/_fdfind

install -Dm644 autocomplete/fdfind.bash "${DPKG_DIR}/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/fdfind"
install -Dm644 autocomplete/fdfind.fish "${DPKG_DIR}/usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/fdfind.fish"
install -Dm644 autocomplete/_fdfind.ps1 "${DPKG_DIR}/usr/share/powershell/Modules/fdfind/_fdfind.ps1"
install -Dm644 autocomplete/_fdfind "${DPKG_DIR}/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_fdfind"

I am not sure if there is a better way to do this.

I wonder if it would be better for the fdfind completions to call the fd completions, rather than duplicating them

I agree that would be ideal.

For bash the fdfind could look like:

# Source fd completions
source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/fd

# Complete with same options as fd
eval "$(complete -p fd | sed 's/ fd$/ fdfind/')"
# Or
#if [[ "${BASH_VERSINFO[0]}" -eq 4 && "${BASH_VERSINFO[1]}" -ge 4 || "${BASH_VERSINFO[0]}" -gt 4 ]]; then
#    complete -F _fd -o nosort -o bashdefault -o default fdfind
#else
#    complete -F _fd -o bashdefault -o default fdfind
#fi

Bash completions are evaluated lazily so a side efffect would be that the completions for fd would be registered when completions for fdfind are triggered in the terminal.

similar apply to zsh

#compdef fdfind

# Source completions from fd
source /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_fd

# Register completions for fdfind
compdef _fd fdfind

For fish the --wraps flag could be used and a completion file could look like:

complete -c fdfind --wraps fd

This seem to work without sourcing anything else.

I am not sure about powershell.
Is this a better approach?

Could these completion files be generated in the create-deb.sh script or should they be static files in contrib/completions?

Another direction could be to append the code snippets for registering the completions in the fd completion files and keeping the symlinks.

That seems like a better approach to me, although I don't know how to do it for Powershell either.

I think putting those in contrib/completions would be fine

The current implementation looks good directionally, but there's a build gap that needs fixing before merge.

create-deb.sh now installs from autocomplete/fdfind.bash, autocomplete/fdfind.fish, and autocomplete/_fdfind, but the Makefile was not updated to generate those files. The autocomplete/ directory is built by make it is not checked into the repo.completions

You'll need to add Makefile targets similar to:

autocomplete/fdfind.bash: contrib/completion/fdfind.bash
knowledge.md $(comp_dir)
knowledge.md cp $< $@

autocomplete/fdfind.fish: contrib/completion/fdfind.fish
knowledge.md $(comp_dir)
knowledge.md cp $< $@

autocomplete/_fdfind: contrib/completion/_fdfind
knowledge.md $(comp_dir)
knowledge.md cp $< $@

And add autocomplete/fdfind.bash autocomplete/fdfind.fish autocomplete/_fdfind as dependencies of the completions target. Without this, the deb build will fail with "no such file."

Otherwise the delegation approach (bash source + complete, zsh _fd "$@", fish --wraps) looks clean. Once this is fixed, could @tmccombs do a formal review?