inquirer-autocomplete-standalone

Standalone autocomplete prompt for the CLI based on inquirer core.

Allows you do do show dynamic choices in a list based on user input, both synchronous or asynchronous allowing you to connect to an external service.

Installation

npm install inquirer-autocomplete-standalone

This is a native ES module package. If you are using it with commonjs you need to import it like this:

async function main() {
  const { default: autocomplete, Separator } = await import(
    'inquirer-autocomplete-standalone'
  );
  const answer = await autocomplete({});
}

main();

If you are using it with typescript see here for examples of how to use it if emitting commonjs or esm from your typescript.

If you want the legacy version used with inquirer version 9 and below then that is located here and can be installed with:

npm install inquirer-autocomplete-prompt

That version will still be maintained for bugs and other issues, but is not the recommended way to use this prompt. This is following the change that Inquirer itself chose. Now the preferred way is to have standalone prompts that you can pick and choose from.

Demo

Run a quick demo locally with

npx inquirer-autocomplete-demo

Usage

import autocomplete from 'inquirer-autocomplete-standalone';
import { searchCountries } = './some-external-api';

const answer = await autocomplete({
  message: 'Travel from what country?',
  source: async (input) => {
    const filteredCountries = await searchCountries(input)
    return filteredCountries.map(country => {
      return {
        value: country,
        description: `${country} is a great place to visit`
      }
    })
  }
})

// user searches and selects a country from the returned list
console.log(answer) // Norway

Options

The generic type Value is whatever type the value of your choices are.

Choice type and description

type Choice = {
  value: Value;
  name?: string;
  description?: string;
  disabled?: boolean | string;
};

Separator

You can also render any Separator to group choices.

import autocomplete, { Separator } from 'inquirer-autocomplete-standalone';

const answer = await autocomplete({
  message: 'Travel from what country?',
  source: async (input) => {
    return [
      new Separator('Africa'),
      new Separator(),
      {
        value: 'Egypt',
      },
      new Separator('Europe'),
      new Separator(),
      {
        value: 'Norway',
      },
    ];
  },
});

? Travel from what country? (Use arrow keys or type to search)
 Africa
 ──────────────
❯ Egypt
 Europe
 ──────────────
  Norway

Credits

Martin Hansen

License

ISC