I’ve seen a number of comments imply the possibility of case insensitive tab completion. Is this real and how do I do it?
I have multiple times fumbled with forgetting to capitalize something, only for the terminal to ‘dunk’ at me
There’s probably some way to add it in bash, but if you install zsh and use the default options for everything, it just works! I especially love zsh for things “just work”: not just tab completion for directories but also having completion for tools like git, docker, kubectl, etc is super easy, and you don’t need any weird magic like in Bash if you want to use an alias with the same completion
Hmm, it didn’t “just work” for me. I had to set it up recently:
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list '' 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}' 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'
That line needs to go in .zshrc. Maybe it’s enabled by default with oh-my-zsh?
I’m sorry, that must be it, I immediately installed oh-my-zsh after switching to zsh
For bash, this is enough:
# Bash TAB-completition enhancements
# Case-insensitive
bind "set completion-ignore-case on"
# Treat - and _ as equivalent in tab-compl
bind "set completion-map-case on"
# Expand options on the _first_ TAB press.
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"
If you also add e.g.CDPATH=~/Documents, it will also always autocomplete from your Documents no matter which directory you’re on.
Well completion-ignore-case is enough to solve this particular problem, the other options are just sugar on top :)
I’m going to add completion-prefix-display-length to these related bonus tips (I have it set to 9). This makes it a lot easier to compare files with long names in your tab completion.
For example if you have a folder with these files:
FoobarSystem-v20.69.11-CrashLog2022-12-22 FoobarSystem-v20.69.11.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12-CrashLog2023-10-02 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.userprofiles
Just type vim TAB to see
...1-CrashLog2022-12-22 ...1.config ...2 ...2-CrashLog2023-10-02 ...2.config ...2.userprofiles
$vim FoobarSystem-v20.69.1
GNU Readline (which is what Bash uses for input) has a lot of options (e.g. making it behave like vim), and your settings are also used in any other programs that use it for their CLI which is a nice bonus. The config file is ~/.inputrc and you’d enable the above mentioned options like this
$include /etc/inputrc
set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-map-case on
set completion-prefix-display-length 9
