Improve Tab Completion in Mac OS X Terminal

Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing of commands when completing, remove the necessity to double-tap the Tab key if something is ambiguous, and last but certainly not least, cycle through a menu of all possibilities rather than dumping a humungous list if there is ambiguity.


If you don’t regularly use the OS X Terminal (or a linux terminal) you probably don’t have a use for this tip.


Launch Terminal and be in the home directory to get started:
Using emacs, nano, vi, or whatever your favorite text editor is to edit .inputrc, we’ll use nano for the walkthrough:


nano .inputrc
Paste in the following three rules on unique lines:


set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
TAB: menu-complete