I’ve been doing a lot of work on TextMate 2 plugins recently and the way shell expansion works in the terminal has been annoying me. Here are some tips to

• speed up access to the Application Support folder,
• create case insensitive tab completions,
• reduce typing to cd to common folders
• and to reuse the TAB key for additional completions.

Getting to Application Support

The TextMate bundles I am working on are hidden in the Library → Application Support Folder. If you type this in your shell (⇥ is the TAB key):

$ cd ~/Library/App⇥

I’ll bet it completes to cd ~/Library/Application\ S and stops. That’s because there are two folders that could match: Application Scripts and Application Support. Since I never need to use Application Scripts, I’d like bash completion to ignore it.

Add the following in your .bash_profile file:

# So I can tab to Application Support
FIGNORE=".o:~:Application Scripts"

The FIGNORE shell variable tells bash completion to ignore files or folders with the matching patterns (colon separated list). Quit and restart your terminal and

$ cd ~/Library/App⇥

correctly maps to

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/

Thanks Allan Odgaard for the tip in Path Completion (bash).

Case Insensitive Completion

I drive myself nuts with case sensitive file and folder names, and then using the wrong case when attempting completion in a shell. I often type

$ cd ~/l⇥

instead of

$ cd ~/L⇥

To get to ~/Library.

To get case-insensitive completion, add the following to a file called ~/.inputrc (.inputrc in your home folder):

set completion-ignore-case on

And restart your terminal. Tab completion will now work no matter what case the file or folder name is.

Tip: If you want it to work with hyphens and underscores as well, add:

set completion-map-case on

Shorter CD

All my code and projects are in ~/Projects/, so I often need to type

$ cd ~/Projects/Kifu/code

to get to the code base on Kifu. I also have a Pictures and a Public folder so tab completing cd ~/P is a pain (see below).

Then I learned about the CDPATH variable in bash. Add folders to this and the cd command will look there as well for the folder you want. In your .bash_profile:

# So I can cd to projects quickly
CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Projects

Now I can type

$ cd Kifu/code

from anywhere to get to the same place.

Warning: Using CDPATH can screw up some scripts where the cd will work on your machine and not on others, use with care.

Also, in OS X, tab completion does not work with CDPATH, you need to type in the full folder name, with the correct case. Or you could install bash-completion using HomeBrew or MacPorts, something I choose not to do (Instructions here).

Aside: For more frequently accessed folders, I use TextExpander snippets to reduce typing; in this case, the expansion of ;cdki takes me to the same place. I just don’t create expansions for all projects. Yes, I know, I could just as easily use shell alias to do the same.

TAB for more completions

In my `.inputrc , I also have

set mark-symlinked-directories on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on

The first line just makes symlinks look better, the second is brilliant. If there are ambiguous files that could match your tab completion, show-all-if-ambiguous shows them all and returns you the same prompt to help you type more to get a match.

So typing

$ cd ~/P⇥

Presents the expansion options:

$ cd ~/P⇥
Pictures/ Projects/ Public/
$ cd ~/P

Thats nice but I’d like to tab through the options instead. Add this to your .inputrc and restart the terminal:

TAB: menu-complete

So typing

$ cd ~/P⇥

now gives

$ cd ~/Pictures/

Press TAB again gives

$ cd ~/Projects/

Update: Thanks to Brett Terpstra’s Quick Tip: some .inputrc fun, you can use SHIFT-TAB to complete in reverse, just add this to your .inputrc:

"\e[Z": "\e-1\C-i"

Summary

My .inputrc

set completion-ignore-case on
set mark-symlinked-directories on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
TAB: menu-complete
"\e[Z": "\e-1\C-i"

Parts of my .bash_profile

# So I can tab to Application Support
FIGNORE=".o:~:Application Scripts"

# So I can cd to projects quickly
CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Projects

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