zsh-autosuggestions is a popular Zsh plugin that displays gray, inline suggestions as you type, based on your shell history and other strategies. It feels a lot like “typeahead” for the terminal: the moment your input matches a past command prefix, a suggestion appears and you can accept it with a key (e.g., right arrow or end-of-line). The plugin is lightweight and fast, designed to keep suggestions responsive even on large histories by performing lookups asynchronously when possible. It’s highly configurable: you can change the suggestion strategy, tweak widget bindings, ignore certain patterns, and control when suggestions appear or are cleared. The plugin plays well with other Zsh staples like syntax highlighting and prompt frameworks, and it provides guidance for avoiding conflicts with custom keymaps.
Features
- Proposes autosuggestions from history (recent commands) as you type into the shell buffer
- Offers alternative suggestion strategy “completion” (based on what tab completion would suggest)
- Supports partial accepts (accept up to cursor) and full accepts of suggestions via key bindings
- Configurable styling of suggestions (foreground / background colors, bold, underline, etc.) via ZSH_AUTOSUGGEST_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE
- Ability to disable suggestions under certain conditions (large/specific buffer sizes, using patterns to ignore certain history entries)
- Asynchronous suggestion fetching (in newer zsh versions) to avoid blocking during typing
Project Samples
