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ArMor007

Member

Registered: 2020-11-15

Posts: 11

[SOLVED] bash tab completion brings up more which is broken

I have added this lines to my bashrc.

bind 'set show-all-if-unmodified off'
bind 'set completion-ignore-case off'

. /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion # bash-completion package

when I have a tab completion that has many choices i.e. pacman -S firefox<tab>, it asks to "Display all N popossibilities?" and a list that looks like a more listing comes up. in ubuntu this functionality was used as a method to find and select the appropriate selection but now only the keys q(which quits), n(which quits) and y(moves a full screen down) work.

how can I fix this? and by fixing I mean make the listing more usable(move up and down like how less works, be able to select something, be able to search farther)?

Last edited by ArMor007 (2020-11-27 09:13:36)

deschain

Member

Registered: 2020-11-15

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] bash tab completion brings up more which is broken

Hi there! First of all, I'd like to point out that I'm using zsh and that it does exactly what you're looking for, more or less out of the box. However, if you'd like to stick with bash, that's understandable and hopefully the following will be helpful - but I'm no bash wizard and didn't quite eek out the functionality as you described.

You can find all of the information that you need in the documentation for bash, with

man bash

First off, if you look at that man page you'll find that

bind 'set show-all-if-unmodified off'
bind 'set completion-ignore-case off' 

does nothing because those are already the default values. I would recommend reading through this thread as it describes how to achieve this. I would also recommend setting "completion-query-items" to a value like 500 or something, so that completion will not ask you "Display all x possibilities?". However, you will most likely not be able to see all the results on screen, but if you keep pressing tab, it'll scroll through the possible completions. Another option would be to change the pager to less instead of more, but I don't know how to do that personally, perhaps search online. And even if you did change the pager, you'd still see the results in a pager, you won't actually be able to select a result from the pager AFAIK.

If you have any more questions, let me know.

Last edited by deschain (2020-11-17 09:26:57)

ArMor007

Member

Registered: 2020-11-15

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] bash tab completion brings up more which is broken

I read around in the man page. here are a few gotchas
1- what I was mentioning is "an internal more-like pager" from "readline"
2- yes those 2 lines don't change anything. they are inherited from my manjaro installation, and I have turned them of at some time.

anyways, the docs don't mention how one changes the pager. maybe if there is configurations for readline?

more digging this time (by using the correct keywords), brought up this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … ug/1691314
This is not a new "bug" or lack of feature and no one has fixed it since.

So the only "fix" for this is using a shell that does not use readline, like zsh as it was mentioned before.

Last edited by ArMor007 (2020-11-27 09:10:14)