Bash – Autojump auto-complete feature does not work

Depending on the command:

• Someone may have written a function to generate possible completions of arguments, including options. You'll find functions for some commands in /etc/bash_completion.d/* (or a different location on some systems). These functions are registered with the complete built-in (e.g. complete -F _find find tells bash to call the _find function when you press Tab on a find command). They use the compgen built-in to tell bash “here are the possible completions”.
• For some commands, bash will call the command with the argument --help and parse the output. Such commands can be registered with the complete built-in, e.g. complete -F _longopt ls. _longopt is in fact a completion generation function, that happens to parse a command's output rather than use a fixed list. (There are other more specialized completion functions that parse a command's output to generate possible completions; look in /etc/bash_completion.d/* for examples.)
• For things like aliases, the completion function looks them up in bash's internal tables. The complete built-in has options for that, e.g. -A for aliases.

You're giving the keystrokes, but not the readline bindings, this can explain differences in observed behaviour (try bind -p).

The only way I can think of to do exactly what you ask is to use a custom completion function that saves the buffer state, and a separate key binding which invokes a companion shell function to restore it.

In addition to @Mark Plotnick's excellent suggestion to use menu-complete, other readline/bash options are:

• shell-backward-kill-word this removes a "shell word" which in the case of an expanded file or path will be the complete file or path name
• backward-kill-word this removes a "readline word", which in the case of a file or path will be a file or directory name component, including the trailing /
• undo which undoes each change atomically, but this almost certainly requires several attempts to fully remove a complete expansion, this is almost certainly the function you have bound to to ctrl-_ (bash default)
• set-mark and kill-region are lesser used readline features, set-mark marks the current cursor position, and kill-region deletes from the mark to the cursor. This requires you to invoke set-mark (default meta-space) in advance so that you can later use kill-region to delete back to it (no default binding)
• possible-completions (bound to meta-=) which lists the completions without modifying the command buffer

You could also write your own function to modify the input buffer, and bind it to a function (here's one I made earlier) but I don't see how that would be very much better than backward-kill-word in this case.

You can test bindings on the fly without using .inputrc using bash's bind command, e.g.:

bind "\C-o: backward-kill-word"
bind "\C-o: shell-backward-kill-word"

backward-kill-word is the best fit, default binding is metactrl-h. set-mark/kill-region would be better, but I can't think of a neat way to automate the use of this though.