How can I make bash tab completion behave like vim tab completion and cycle through matching matches?

By default TAB is bound to the complete readline command. Your desired behavior would be menu-complete instead. You can change your readlines settings by editing ~/.inputrc. To rebind TAB, add this line:

TAB: menu-complete

For more details see the READLINE section in man bash.

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For bash >= 4 you might like these settings. You can try them directly on the command-line, and put them in your ~/.bash_profile if you like them.

# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them
bind 'TAB:menu-complete'

# Display a list of the matching files
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"

# Perform partial (common) completion on the first Tab press, only start
# cycling full results on the second Tab press (from bash version 5)
bind "set menu-complete-display-prefix on"

This setup is similar to Vim's set wildmode=longest:full:list,full

I pulled these settings from this question on the Unix & Linux site.

By the way, since you are here, here is another nice pair of bindings:

# Cycle through history based on characters already typed on the line
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

This means if you type ssh<Up> it will cycle through previous lines where you ran ssh

If you don't like what you got, you can clear the line with Ctrl-K Ctrl-U

I pulled these settings from this question on AskUbuntu.

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On top of

# cycle forward
Control-k: menu-complete
# cycle backward
Control-j: menu-complete-backward

you may also consider adding

# display one column with matches
set completion-display-width 1

This way you would preserve the current Tab functionality and make bash display the possibilities in one column. So instead of

file_12340983421 file_12390983421 file_12390986421 file_12391983421

you would get

file_12340983421
file_12390983421
file_12390986421
file_12391983421

P.S. You can get up to date readline library from this The GNU Readline Library website.

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Thanks to @sth I found what works best for me:

To keep normal bash tab completion, and then use ctl-f to cycle through when needed using menu-complete

put this in your .inputrc file:

"\C-f": menu-complete

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In my experience, the solution provided in sth's answer has never completely worked for me. TL;DR: Add set -o vi to your ~/.bashrc.

When using menu-complete in conjunction with vi keybindings, I have to make sure that my ~/.bashrc has:

set -o vi

It's never been enough for my ~/.inputrc just to have:

TAB: menu-complete

set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi

My guess is that somehow set editing-mode and set keymap are clobbering the TAB: ... setting, but I haven't looked into the documentation thoroughly to figure out why this is the case.

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