Autocomplete fails while using zsh.

Bug report

Required Info:

• Operating System:
  • Ubuntu 18.04
• Installation type:
  • binaries
• Version or commit hash:
  • Dashing / Eloquent
• DDS implementation:
  • ALL
• Client library (if applicable):
  • N/A

Steps to reproduce issue

I use zsh as my shell, but I find some problems while using <tab> to autocomplete.

• While I type ros2 run <tab>, it works well.
• However when I type ros2 run d<tab>, it can’t show the packages which starts with ‘d’.

Additional information

After some debugging, I find that the behavior is related to argcomplete library in Python 3. If I remove the library rm -rf ~/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/argcomplete*, zsh works well again. I’m not pretty sure what the root cause is. Maybe argcomplete library does not support zsh well.

[chenjunnn]

Having the same issue with Zsh and ROS2 Galactic too.

But I found a solution in https://kislyuk.github.io/argcomplete/#zsh-support

By adding these lines to .zshrc the argcompletion is succesfully enabled.

# argcomplete for ros2 & colcon
eval "$(register-python-argcomplete3 ros2)"
eval "$(register-python-argcomplete3 colcon)"

(Thanks to https://github.com/ros2/ros2cli/issues/534#issuecomment-957905035, I removed the unnessecary autoload -U bashcompinit \ bashcompinit)

[frankkusters]

Instead of running eval "$(register-python-argcomplete3 ros2)" every time after sourcing setup.zsh, I made a modification in /opt/ros/galactic/share/rosidl_cli/environment/rosidl-argcomplete.zsh. I removed/commented the line:

autoload -U +X compinit && compinit

Then ros2 tab completion works. This has to do with compinit being called too many times (see also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67136714/how-to-properly-call-compinit-and-bashcompinit-in-zsh ).

I’m not sure what a final fix should be, especially since tab completion for colcon still doesn’t work with this change (the eval "$(register-python-argcomplete3 colcon)" is still needed for that).