Johnny Matthews | Multipass ZSH completion

If you’re tired of typing multipass list just to remember what you called that Ubuntu instance, this script’s for you. It adds proper tab completion to your shell so you can just type multipass shell <TAB> and see all your VMs pop up like magic.

What it does

Smart command completion: Type multipass <TAB> to see all available commands.
Instance name completion: For commands like shell, exec, start, stop, etc., it’ll show you all your actual VM instances.
Works with most Multipass commands: Covers all the usual suspects you’d want to tab-complete.

Prerequisities

ZSH.
Multipass installed and working.
A basic grasp of how to edit text files.

Installation

Dead simple:

Create a completions dir if you don’t have one already:
```
mkdir -p ~/.config/zsh/completions
```
Download the completion file into that dir:
```
wget -O ~/.config/zsh/completions/_multipass https://johnnymatthews.dev/blog/2025-05-22-multipass-zsh-completion/multipass-zsh-completion/_multipass
```
If that link isn’t working, or you’ve not got Wget installed, use the GitHub mirror and Curl like a pleb:
```
curl -o ~/.config/zsh/completions/_multipass https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnnymatthews/multipass-zsh-autocomplete/refs/heads/yolo/_multipass
```
Add these lines to your ~/.zshrc:
```
fpath=(~/.config/zsh/completions $fpath)
autoload -Uz compinit && compinit
```
I don’t think it matters where you put these lines, but it might. I dunno. Find someone who knows stuff.
Reload ZSH:
```
source ~/.zshrc
```
Done.

Usage

Now you can do lovely things like:

multipass shell <TAB> to show all your running instances.
multipass stop <TAB> show instances you can stop.
multipass <TAB> to show all available commands.

Troubleshooting

Not working? Make sure:

The script is executable and in the right place.
You’ve reloaded your shell after editing .zshrc.
Multipass is actually installed and multipass list works from the command line. . Still not working? Try running compinit manually to reinitialise completions.

Still, still not working? Drop an issue in this repo.