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Comment by deeg | Hacker News Reader

I do the exact same thing. This will probably be considered sacrilege by some but I also remap tab completion to cycle through all matches instead of stopping at the first ambiguous character:

# Set up tab and Shift-tab to cycle through completion options

"\e[Z": "\e-1\t"

TAB: menu-complete

# Alt-S is normal style TAB complete

"\es": complete

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> I also remap tab completion to cycle through all matches instead of stopping at the first ambiguous character

Windows PowerShell does this and I love it. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t want this

Because instead of helping me enter a long filename by its distinctive parts, it forces flat mental read-decide-skip loop based on first few letters, which is slow and cannot be narrowed down without typing out additional letters by hand. It is like selecting from a popup menu through a 1-line window.

If it presented a real popup for file selection, combining both worlds (tab to longest match, untab to undo, up-down to navigate), that would be great. But it doesn’t.

For anyone who isn’t already aware, fzf[0] does this exactly (and more!)

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Rust implementation [1]

[1] https://github.com/lotabout/skim

Thanks! Its vim plugin seems very promising.

> which is slow and cannot be narrowed down without typing out additional letters by hand.

In a PowerShell environment specifically, you usually end up having to backspace a dozen or more characters completed from a long command name before you can resume narrowing the search. It's less of a problem on a Unix shell where commands tend to be short.

Interestingly, that's one of the things I hate about powershell (and dos)

zsh works like that too.

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