I’m moving away from Windows (yay!) and need to bring a few features with me. Microsoft added this auto complete feature to PowerShell recently and I need something similar:
I found this package which is helpful, but it requires you to hit tab before you get a list of suggested commands: https://wiki.debian.org/Add Bash Completion
Do I need a different shell entirely? I’m using bash on Debian now.
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Use fish as your command line shell, it’s doing exactly that and way more.
It’s so intuitive and useful that I forgot that it was not part of the standard shell.
It… it never occurred to me to use a different shell. Hm. Maybe I should.
Definitely doable with zsh plugins. There are some options for bash like this but ive never used them
I recommend starship in combination with fish
I’ve not encountered this for bash.
The usual recommendation is to use Ctrl+r and do lookups when you need them.
Auto-suggestions are built into the fish shell and easily added to zsh. I haven’t explored beyond those in a long time.
I hesitate to recommend changing shells for a newbie, but plenty of distros are using alternatives out of the box (usually zsh).
The typical journey for a newbie power user is a switch to zsh and an installation of oh-my-zsh, and then you can install zsh-autosuggestions as a plugin.
I wouldn’t recommend fish shell to you yet, but only because you’re new enough on your journey to be copy-pasting and fish isn’t posix compliant which could throw you off occasionally. (This will probably bait some fish fanatics).
As a fish fanatic, I agree completely.
Tab completion is the thing on linux, you can probably get something similar with zsh and it’s plugins, maybe with fish too.
Fish has it built-in.
It is, after all, a command line shell for the 90s.
Are you sure you cannot get used to the double-Tab?
It has everything you ask for and more; except for the visual in your screenshot.
If the answer really is No, you’ll have to move away from bash for interactive shells.
You could be a mad lad like me and run PowerShell on Linux and as long as you have the PSReadline module you’ll get this autocomplete. As others mentioned fish is also a great shell and I think with oh-my-bash and oh-my-zsh bash and zsh can do this as well.
I don’t know if it has it but Nushell might also have something similar and feel a bit more natural coming from pwsh.
tldr; You can stick with pwsh or have tons of alternative options!
Is Ctrl+R good enough for you? I use it all the time.
Stock ctrl-r is kinda shit but you can make it a lot better with McFly or Atuin.
