Launch HN: Fig (YC S20) – Autocomplete for the Terminal
Hi HN! We’re Matt and Brendan, co-founders of Fig (https://fig.io/hn). Fig adds VSCode-style autocomplete to your existing terminal.

We built Fig because of our own struggles in the terminal: we were tired of context switching between man pages, Stack Overflow posts, and Medium tutorials anytime we got stuck. We wanted our CLI tools to be more discoverable.

The terminal is powerful, but unforgiving. It emulates the constraints of hardware (like teletype printers and video terminals) that became obsolete a generation ago. There are no built-in affordances. No hints about the 'right way' of using a tool or even finding the right tool for the job. Beginners are thrown in the deep end. And even seasoned developers can screw up their system with a few unfortunate keystrokes.

To solve this, we add a UI overlay that is linked with the interactive shell. As you type, Fig pops up subcommands, options, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal. For example, you can type `npm run` and Fig will show you the scripts available in your package.json. You could also type `cd` when SSH'd into a remote machine and Fig will list the folders within your current directory on the remote machine.

We use the Accessibility API on Mac to insert text on your behalf and read what you've typed. We also integrate with the shell to determine the current process and working directory. We are built natively for macOS in swift. We built our UI using web technologies so we can ultimately go cross platform. We render it using a WKWebView (not Electron).

Fig is free for individuals and always will be. All completion specs - the templates used for generating CLI suggestions - are open source and anyone can contribute [0]. We plan to monetize by supporting autocomplete for companies' custom scripts and internal CLI tools. Ultimately, we want to bring other process documentation (like SRE runbooks or deployment workflows) closer to the environment where it's used. You can see an early iteration of Fig in this HN thread from last July. [1]

Fig is designed to be private. All processing happens locally on your device. None of your keystrokes are ever transmitted or stored by Fig.

We'd love to hear your feedback on what we’ve built! We're still in private beta (so things may break!!), but we are letting HN users skip our waitlist today and tomorrow using the link above! :)

----Edit----

We really appreciate all of this feedback! Brendan and I want to address some of the most common concerns below:

Telemetry:
Fig has basic telemetry in order to help us make product decisions. We currently give the you option to opt out of all non-essential telemetry by running `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true`. This removes everything except for one daily ping. We use this ping to help us understand how many people were using Fig.

Adding this ping was a mistake. We have already removed it and will be pushing this change in our next build (v1.0.43).

Business Model:
Under the hood, we've built an API layer on top of the terminal. This API lets you create visual apps. Autocomplete is the first app we've built using this API. We have many more planned for things like interactive runbooks for SREs and automating deployment workflows. You can see some early prototypes here. [2] We plan to monetize these team-based apps by charging per-seat.

Autocomplete will always be free for individuals. We will never sell your data.

[0] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980

[2] https://withfig.com/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4