How can I make bash tab completion behave like vim tab completion and cycle through matching matches?

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.

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

For bash >= 4 you might like these settings. You can try them directly on the command-line, and put them in your ~/.bash_profile if you like them.

# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them
bind 'TAB:menu-complete'

# Display a list of the matching files
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"

# Perform partial (common) completion on the first Tab press, only start
# cycling full results on the second Tab press (from bash version 5)
bind "set menu-complete-display-prefix on"

This setup is similar to Vim's set wildmode=longest:full:list,full

I pulled these settings from this question on the Unix & Linux site.

By the way, since you are here, here is another nice pair of bindings:

# Cycle through history based on characters already typed on the line
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

This means if you type ssh<Up> it will cycle through previous lines where you ran ssh

If you don't like what you got, you can clear the line with Ctrl-K Ctrl-U

I pulled these settings from this question on AskUbuntu.