Monday, February 26, 2007

programmable tab completion: you may already have it!

Not long ago, I was doing some mundane upgrade task on the Ubuntu box on my desk. I'd switched out monitors and video cards, and I wanted to make it reconfigure X.org. I type out "dpkg-reconfigure x..." (details are orthogonal, I suppose). But the amazing thing was, I hit tab out of habit, and bash magically filled in the name of the package and some other options, appropriate for the context!

It turns out that this is a feature known as Programmable Completion, available in modern versions of bash and enabled by default in Ubuntu! Who knew?

For example, the Ubuntu version of the programmable completion only fills in ".java" files when you're issuing a "javac" command, and it auto-completes class names (but not .class files) when you're trying to run a Java program from the command line. Flippin' sweet.

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