How to make zsh completion act more like bash completion

zsh

I'm a recent convert from bash to zsh (which I'm using "oh my zsh" with), but one thing annoys me:

When I hit the tab key, the first autocompletion is filled out automatically, and you need to cycle through the completions by hitting tab repeatedly.

This differs from bash, where you are just shown a list of the completions. If all completions have the same prefix, then this prefix is filled out. You can select the one you want by continuing to type.

I find the latter preferable since it is faster to type, than to select a completion by hitting tab repeatedly.

Is there any way to make zsh completion act more like bash in this regard?

Best Answer

setopt noautomenu
setopt nomenucomplete

You need both of them. If you hit tab enough times, you'll get the list of completions but it will never add any characters to what you've typed so far.

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

zsh is for vulcans. ;-)

Seriously: bash 4.0 has some features previously only found in zsh, like ** globbing:

% ls /usr/src/**/Makefile

is equivalent to:

% find /usr/src -name "Makefile"

but obviously more powerful.

In my experience bash's programmable completion performs a bit better than zsh's, at least for some cases (completing debian packages for aptitude for example).

bash has Alt + . to insert !$

zsh has expansion of all variables, so you can use e.g.



% rm !$<Tab>


for this. zsh can also expand a command in backtics, so

% cat `echo blubb | sed 's/u/a/'`<Tab>


yields

% cat blabb


I find it very useful to expand rm *, as you can see what would be removed and can maybe remove one or two files from the commmand to prevent them from being deleted.

Also nice: using the output from commands for other commands that do not read from stdin but expect a filename:

% diff <(sort foo) <(sort bar)


From what I read bash-completion also supports completing remote filenames over ssh if you use ssh-agent, which used to be a good reason to switch to zsh.

Aliases in zsh can be defined to work on the whole line instead of just at the beginning:

% alias -g ...="../.."
% cd ...

SSH – How to Edit Command Completion for SSH on Zsh

Here's the relevant part from my .zshrc. It hasn't changed since 2002, so I might write it differently today, but it still works to complete host names from ~/.ssh/config and ~/.ssh/known_hosts (if HashKnownHosts is off — it didn't exist in those days).

h=()
if [[ -r ~/.ssh/config ]]; then
  h=($h ${${${(@M)${(f)"$(cat ~/.ssh/config)"}:#Host *}#Host }:#*[*?]*})
fi
if [[ -r ~/.ssh/known_hosts ]]; then
  h=($h ${${${(f)"$(cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts{,2} || true)"}%%\ *}%%,*}) 2>/dev/null
fi
if [[ $#h -gt 0 ]]; then
  zstyle ':completion:*:ssh:*' hosts $h
  zstyle ':completion:*:slogin:*' hosts $h
fi

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

SSH – How to Edit Command Completion for SSH on Zsh

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