Working on a node.js/coffeescript project I got tired of keeping in mind and typing all the tasks defined in the Cakefile. As Cakefiles are very similar to the Ruby Rakefiles, I had a look at existing solutions for rake. The first google result pointed me to a working snipped I already had lying around in my zsh.d directory. It turned out to be very easy task to modify the rake completion. Basically, I just needed to change the following line from

rake --silent --tasks | cut -d " " -f 2 > .rake_tasks

to

cake | cut -d " " -f 2 > .cake_tasks

Additionally, I removed the annoying ‘Generating .*tasks’ output. Add an .caketasks line to the ignore list of your repository and you’re done.

The final zsh snippet looks like this. Add it to your .zshrc or to some other location that gets loaded when zsh starts:

_cake_does_task_list_need_generating () {
  if [ ! -f .cake_tasks ]; then return 0;
  else
    accurate=$(stat -f%m .cake_tasks)
    changed=$(stat -f%m Cakefile)
    return $(expr $accurate '>=' $changed)
  fi
}
_cake () {
  if [ -f Cakefile ]; then
    if _cake_does_task_list_need_generating; then
      cake | cut -d " " -f 2 > .cake_tasks
    fi
    compadd `cat .cake_tasks`
  fi
}
compdef _cake cake