this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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[–] PennyJim 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] PennyJim 3 points 9 months ago

Setting CDPATH=:~/Documents/Dev makes navigating to any of my projects so much easier.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks kind stranger. Never knew of this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

No problem!

As an aside, I see we're bringing the strangers thing over from Reddit. I hope more of the fun and funny stuff gets over, I miss some of the light shitposting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm sorry, that must be it, I immediately installed oh-my-zsh after switching to zsh

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I tend to always install both of them together too! Which makes it a little hard to know where things are coming from. This time I decided to start from scratch, so certain aspects of the config are still salient in my mind