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Accepted
William Knight
Asked: 2010-03-06 09:59:01 +0800 CST

How to get both tab completion and readline editing in mingw/msys shell?

  • 772

I'm running msys 1.0 on Win2K using the rxvt.exe terminal. By default, tab-completion works, but when I do 'set -o vi' to enable vi-readline editing, tab-completion stops working. Surely I can have my cake and eat it too?

command-line-interface rxvt

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Add this line to your ~/.inputrc:

    "\C-i": vi-complete

    To enable it in the current session without having to restart it, type this at the Bash prompt:

     bind '"\C-i":vi-complete'
    • 2

  2. After searching the mailing list, I added these lines to the top of my .inputrc file:

    set editing-mode vi
TAB: complete

    This seems to work for me so far.

    • 1

  3. Typing 

    set -o vi

    followed by 

    bind '"\C-i":complete'

    seems to give me the behavior I want (tab tab suggestions, and vi editing behavior). This seems strange to me because 

    "\C-i":complete

    is the default in the ~/.inputrc file.

    Adding 

    "\C-i": vi-complete

    to your 

    ~/.inputrc

    seems to work but only if there is a single suggestion, and tab tab does not give you a list of suggestions as it did before. Does anyone have a more complete suggestion?

    I tried:

    $if mode=vi
      # "\C-i": complete
        "\C-i": vi-complete
$endif

    But it as no effect if I switch to vi after I start mingw by typing 

    set -o vi

    Of course

    bind '"\C-i":vi-complete'

    does work, but tab tab does not show all suggestions, and it only auto-completes if there is but a single suggestion.

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