Question

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 horrible 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.

Answer 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.