Enabling Iex tab-completion in Windows

Questions / Help
1

How does Iex tab-completion work in Linux?

How can we emulate same or similar in Windows without WERL.exe ?

Where can we start looking?

I doubt if this is a VM related issue.

If linux simply provides modules required for this feature that are missing on windows, then I believe we have a direction for a solution.

Your thoughts?

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2

You can get auto completion in windows by passing 

–werl
when opening iex.

iex --werl -S mix

or in powershell
iex.bat --werl -S mix

you can set this as your default option by setting your environment veriable
IEX_WITH_WERL

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3

I think that werl is not the best solution for someone working on the terminal since it disrupts the experience by opening a new window - also it’s ugly as hell :grimacing: .

@CharlesO I’ve tested some solutions on Windows without much success. I’ve posted more details on my findings in the existing issue: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/4103

.

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4

same here. I just manage Cmder/ ConEmu and live without auto-completion

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5

using elixir in ubuntu wsl + window terminal, everything works

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6

I think the point is to have native support on Windows. Besides, WSL (1 and 2) has a lot of problems and puts yet another step that generates friction on preping your dev environment.

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7

I don’t bother with WSL at all.

Like you mentioned IRB works just fine with the windows console out of the box, hopefully IEx will get to that level

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8

Coming to this after several years, I just wanted to point out there is currently a chance at getting funding to implement this functionality (if someone is interested). You can find out more about it here:

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9

For the record, it was fixed (see the issue above in erlang OTP 26.
You can grab Erlang OTP 26 RC1 here: Release OTP 26.0-rc1 · erlang/otp · GitHub
This may be the default once that’s released.

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