Question

Using the terminal under biolinux distro I realized that when I use the tab for auto completion the possible matching options are displayed under the command line and if I keep ‘tabbing’ each the options is automatically entered in the command line.

example:
I type more + TAB

user@biolinux more                                                       [ 2:01PM]
admin.log     Documents/    missfont.log  Pictures/     Templates/    
Desktop/      Downloads/    Music/        Public/       Videos/    

then press TAB again

user@biolinux more admin.log                                              [ 2:01PM]
admin.log     Documents/    missfont.log  Pictures/     Templates/    
Desktop/      Downloads/    Music/        Public/       Videos/ 

Notice that pressing TAB not only gives the next option for auto complete but also displays a list of the whole options without adding a jumping a new line and printing the list each time I press TAB to the shell.

Apparently the default shell in biolinux is zsh (echo $SHELL). Is this behaviour specific to zsh? Can this be mimicked on bash?

Answer 1

Check out http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html and give zsh some love 🙂