When I used to use Jekyll, I had a workflow where a post would start as a draft, sitting in the _drafts folder, and once it was ready, I would "promote" it to a full-blown post.

This started to get a bit painful, so I automated the process with a little helper script.

Although this is fairly straightforward, the bit that I was really proud of was being able to use my shell's auto-complete to make this an easier process for me.

For instance:

$ ls _drafts
test.md  test2.md
$ jekyll_promote <TAB>
# auto-completes the `test`
$ jekyll_promote test<TAB>
completing file
test2.md  test.md

You can see the below Asciicast for a more visual example of the flow:

Let's assume that we have a function jekyll_promote which performs the following:

jekyll_promote() {
	git mv "_drafts/$1" "_posts/$(date -I)-$1"
}

Zsh

I'm running Zsh as my shell, which has a really straightforward autocomplete syntax which tells it to just autocomplete the files in the _drafts directory:

compdef '_path_files -W $PWD/_drafts' jekyll_promote

Bash

However, I know that lots of people are not using Zsh but instead use Bash, so I've also created the following autocomplete magic for Bash. This is a little more involved, and adapts a StackOverflow answer of a similar type:

# Adapted from https://askubuntu.com/a/707643
_jekyll_promote () {
	local cur
	COMPREPLY=()
	cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
	k=0
	drafts_dir="$PWD/_drafts"
	for draft in $( compgen -f "$drafts_dir/$cur" ); do
		[[ -d "$draft" ]] && continue
		COMPREPLY[k++]=${draft#$drafts_dir/} # remove the directory prefix from the array
	done
	return 0
}

complete -o nospace -F _jekyll_promote jekyll_promote