How to Disable Bash Tab Completion

autocompletebash

Is it possible to disable bash's autocomplete on pressing tab?

The reason I want to do this is that I often paste code from an editor where I use the tab character instead of a number of spaces for indention, into my terminal.

And no, you can't convince me to use spaces instead of tabs.

Best Answer

put

 set disable-completion on

string in ~/.inputrc and restart your shell. it will disable completion at all.

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Bash Terminal – Output Tab Character

Tab is not a printable character. Tab is a control character that usually advances the cursor (but not at the end of line), leaving the characters that it's jumping through unchanged.

gnome-terminal (and other vte-based emulators) have a special hack that it tries to preserve tabs for copy-paste purposes, however, it still loses them at a soft linebreak. Other emulators might also have such a hack, but typically they don't.

See also the conversation at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769316.

Bash – How to expand filenames with Tab, even when a shell variable is used in the path

The issue was that the shell option direxpand was not set. The following solved the issue:

shopt -s direxpand

Best Answer

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Bash Terminal – Output Tab Character

Bash – How to expand filenames with Tab, even when a shell variable is used in the path

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