#Shorthand (hh) and autocomplete

hardhat-shorthand is an NPM package that installs a globally accessible binary called hh that runs the project's locally installed hardhat and supports shell autocompletion for tasks.

# Installation

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

npm i -g 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.

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.