Bash – How to make bash tab completion behave like vim tab completion and cycle through matching matches

bashshellvim

I've been meaning to find a solution for this for YEARS.

I am sooo much more productive in vim when manipulating files than bash for this reason.

If I have

file_12390983421
file_12391983421
file_12340983421
file_12390986421

In bash and type file_1->tab , it obviously lists: 

file_12390983421 file_12391983421 file_12340983421 file_12390986421

And this is a horrible bore and painful to work with.

The same sequence in vim will loop through the files one at a time.

Please someone tell me how to do this in bash, or if there is another shell that can do this, I'll switch tomorrow.

Best Answer

By default TAB is bound to the complete readline command. Your desired behavior would be menu-complete instead. You can change your readlines settings by editing ~/.inputrc. To rebind TAB, add this line:

TAB: menu-complete

For more details see the READLINE section in man bash.

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