Saturday, November 29, 2008

Mac OS X Terminal - case insensitive auto-complete

An annoying thing with the Mac terminal is that, out of the box, the tab completion* is case sensitive. Perhaps in linux land this is ok because most things are kept lower case. But, many default folders in Mac Os X start with upper-case letters (Desktop, Pictures, Public, etc). So, to turn off the case-sensitive completion, simply type this on the command line:

> echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

Be sure to start a new terminal instance for the changes to take effect.


* (Tab completion is when you start typing a folder or file in the terminal/console and hit tab, it auto completes to any matches it finds. Very handy and if you don't already use it, you should!)

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By Nick at 12:12 PM
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5 comments:

  1. Dude, if you're at a unix prompt on OSX, maybe it's time to get used to a case sensitive shell because if you go to Linux or any other flavour of Unix you'll not be afforded said luxury of a case insensitive shell.

    Time to man up and hit the shift key :)

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  2. @Costas: That's incorrect; this will work on any system with bash as the shell, the default for most Unices.

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  3. Nice. Thanks for the tip, and case insensitive makes sense for Macs @Costas because the filesystem is case insensitive as well.

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  4. Thanks a bunch! :)

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  5. great. This was one of the features which got me wondering ... How come windows CMD has it but Bash doesn't . This is just what I needed

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