Terminal: Smart tab completion

As a recent switcher from Ubuntu (Well recent switch backer if that's a word) I'm finding myself in the command line a lot more than when I was a mac user before. One thing I really loved about Ubuntu was when I was compiling and running java programs for class my tab completion was really smart. When I needed to compile my class if I had a directory that looked like:

and I needed to compile the Client.java to take into account the most recent changes I would type:


and it would complete to

ignoring the .class files because you can't run javac on a .class. Also when I wanted to run the file typing


would result in


with no period. This was a very smart way of doing the tab completion that I got so used to that now it's driving me crazy when I hit tab and it gives me the Client. without actually completing to what I need it to be.

So is there any way to make the Mac bash completion smarter so that it would have this same effect?

Hrm, I'd have to play with it. Ubuntu's method would drive me bananas.

Check out

Bash completion for Mac OS X | Me in IT

or

Getting <code>bash</code> Completion Magic on OS X — prb.io

I normally work in a korn shell, so I'm still sooo used to hitting esc twice, it's not even funny.

I ended up getting bash-completion through homebrew and it works wonderfully thanks for the suggestion Dysfunction

I'm not familiar with the intricacies of configuring bash beyond changing the PS1 env variable to change my prompt so I may not be able to help much here. That said, I tested your situation and as expected, tab completion stopped at the . (so, Client.). This makes sense since there are multiple possibilities after the period. I'm not sure if it's possible to have bash ignore certain file extensions especially if you're only trying to do it for certain binaries (javac in this case). Let me take a look into this.

EDIT: I seem to be really slow on the typing today. Glad to see you found a solution.

CaldwellYSR said:

I ended up getting bash-completion through homebrew and it works wonderfully thanks for the suggestion Dysfunction

Click to expand...

Awesome! Glad it's working for you, nothing's worse than having to change how you work! (now I REALLY wish GNU grep had the -p option)

vansmith said:

I'm not familiar with the intricacies of configuring bash beyond changing the PS1 env variable to change my prompt so I may not be able to help much here. That said, I tested your situation and as expected, tab completion stopped at the . (so, Client.). This makes sense since there are multiple possibilities after the period. I'm not sure if it's possible to have bash ignore certain file extensions especially if you're only trying to do it for certain binaries (javac in this case). Let me take a look into this.

EDIT: I seem to be really slow on the typing today. Glad to see you found a solution.

Click to expand...

The bash-completion solution really extends the power of bash in my opinion. Not only because of the java problem I was having, but it also makes the tab completion ignore files when using the cd command (since you can't cd into a file) and ignore directories and other, uneditable files with nano or vim.