Comments on: Improve Tab Completion in Mac OS X Terminal

By: Umair

Umair — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:06:26 +0000

Thanks a lot for the tip. I’m a Windows user and just got a MAC. Your help will really help me getting used to MAC

Bruno — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:38:37 +0000

Lauri Ranta — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 12:53:46 +0000

My favorite thing to do in .inputrc is to assign shortcuts to history-search-backward and history-search-forward.

"\C-p": history-search-backward
"\C-n": history-search-forward

If you for example open a new tab and type “def”, control-P would insert the previous command starting with “def”.

Derek — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:17:26 +0000

In related news, zsh 5.0 was recently released. I would definitely recommend zsh to anyone who uses the terminal frequently.

William Scott — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 21:34:38 +0000

If you really want intelligent tab completion, along with many other life-simplifying features, take a look at /bin/zsh

It is arguably a more powerful shell than bash (and resembles ksh in lineage), but is the most user-friendly of the shells that come with Mac OS X.

One of the finest features is remote file name completion, when using scp or ssh.