VMD autocompletion

it really bothers me a lot without the autocompletion in modern console. How the * can we use the terminal, as so called console in last century from you old geeks, (a jealous tone with full of respects for your hardworking and talents), without it?

what is the autocompletion?

it is a mechanism can shallowly read my minds to complete the full word when I “double TAB” on a few chars.

carrying on this idea, the most successful application, so far I know, is the “fuck” package, link: https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck, given on a little clue, you can “fuck” them all, until to the end.

let us back to our topic, VMD is a acronym Visual Molecular Dynamics, I am struggled with it on this typical question in a very long time.

I know VMD is mostly on the basis of Tcl language, so I initially thought it was my computer's problem that made it lack of this function, which is also the reason I have spent some time on the customization of tclsh, however, I was not lucky.

I decided to parse its source codes, I happen to find a file called “vmd_completion.dat” under its folder, I realized VMD does have this feature built, it must be something wrong in my settings, or even worse, compilation process.

After debugging in some time, I finally located the culprit,

See, the work of auto-completion is done by rlwrap, which is missing in my computer!

knowing it, after rlwrap is installed, everything is perfectly solved.

Besides, I happen to find a discussion slightly related with it: https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/mailing_list/vmd-l/24558.html

However, honestly, I do have little complaining about it, this important feature should have been mentioned inside its document.

Nonetheless, I still want to express my full of gratitude and respects to VMD and its developers.