boot banner project
Andrew Gallatin
gallatin at cs.duke.edu
Thu May 5 06:26:26 PDT 2005
Brian Candler writes:
>
> Tab-completion is "on" in the sense that it works if only a single unique
> filename matches. It is "off" in the sense that if more than one filename
> matches, nothing happens except a terminal beep.
>
> The behaviour that many people miss from `bash` is that pressing tab in that
> circumstance pops up a list of matching filenames to choose from. You can
> then type the next character or two and hit tab again. That's what "set
> autolist" gives you.
>
This is exactly the behaviour that drives me screaming from bash.
Here's why: I do most of my work over an IPSec tunnel between
endpoints 3000 miles apart. Interactive performance tends to be slow,
and I'm a sucky typist, even after 20 years of computer use. For me,
this combination of bad interactive performance and sucky typing is
fine in tcsh, but annoying in bash.
Being a sucky typist means I like to hit tab to get the shell to fill
things in for me, up until the point at which things diverge.
Bad interactive performance means that sometimes when I hit that
first tab, its hard to know if I actually hit it. After a second
or so of not seeing any completions, I just automatically hit
it again.
In tcsh, hitting a tab once or 2 times results in the same thing --
filling in the path until there are multiple choices. So that
second, accidental tab is harmless.
But in bash, that second, accidental tab results in a long pause while
the shell lists all the different choices for the completion of
the path. Which I don't want to wait for.
If I could make bash's completion act like tcsh completion (^D rather
than tab-tab), I'd probably use it.
Drew
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