#Command-line completion

Hardhat has a companion npm package that acts as a shorthand for npx hardhat, and at the same time, it enables command-line completions in your terminal.

This package, hardhat-shorthand, installs a globally accessible binary called hh that runs your locally installed hardhat.

# Installation

To use the Hardhat shorthand you need to install it globally:

npm install --global hardhat-shorthand

After doing this running hh will be equivalent to running npx hardhat. For example, instead of running npx hardhat compile you can run hh compile.

#Installing the command-line completions

To enable autocomplete support you'll also need to install the shell completion script using hardhat-completion, which comes with hardhat-shorthand. Run hardhat-completion install and follow the instructions to install the completion script:

$ hardhat-completion install
✔ Which Shell do you use ? · zsh
✔ We will install completion to ~/.zshrc, is it ok ? (y/N) · true
=> Added tabtab source line in "~/.zshrc" file
=> Added tabtab source line in "~/.config/tabtab/zsh/__tabtab.zsh" file
=> Wrote completion script to /home/fvictorio/.config/tabtab/zsh/hh.zsh file

      => Tabtab source line added to ~/.zshrc for hh package.

      Make sure to reload your SHELL.

To try it out, open a new terminal, go to the directory of your Hardhat project, and try typing hh followed by tab:

# Context

Out of best practice, Hardhat projects use a local installation of the npm package hardhat to make sure everyone working on the project is using the same version. This is why you need to use npx or npm scripts to run Hardhat.

This approach has the downside of there being no way to provide autocomplete suggestions directly for the hardhat command, as well as making the CLI commands longer. These are the two issues that hh solves.

# Troubleshooting

#"Autocompletion is not working"

First, make sure you installed the autocompletion script with hardhat-completion install, then either reload your shell or open a new terminal to try again.

If you still have problems, make sure that your Hardhat config doesn't have any issues. You can do this by just running hh. If the command prints the help message, then your config is fine. If not, you'll see what the problem is.

If you are using zsh, these are some other things you can try:

Run declare -f _hh_completion. If you don't get any output, then the completion script is not being loaded.
Check that your .zshrc has a line that loads a __tabtab.zsh file. This is the file that in turn should load the hh completion.
Check that this __tabtab.zsh exists, and that there is a hh.zsh file in that same directory.
Make sure that your .zshrc is autoloading compinit. This means that you should have something like autoload -U compinit && compinit before the __tabtab.zsh line.

If you are using bash, try this:

Run complete -p hh. You should get complete -o default -F _hh_completion hh as the output.
Check that your .bashrc has a line that loads a __tabtab.bash file. This is the file that in turn should load the hh completion.
Check that this __tabtab.bash exists, and that there is a hh.bash file in that same directory.

#Windows user

hardhat-shorthand doesn't work well by default on Windows. Please read this to learn why and how to improve it.

On Windows, the default hh command is associated with the HTML Help executable program (hh.exe). To use hardhat-shorthand, you can simply run npx hh instead of hh, but that won't work well with its autocompletion.

If you want to use hh on Windows, you can follow these steps:

Run npm config get prefix to get the npm global packages installation location.
Add the npm location to the Path environment variable.
Make sure to add the npm location to Path before %SystemRoot% because default hh.exe is in %SystemRoot%, and it will take precedence over hh-shorthand otherwise.