Disable bash tab completion

Question

Is it possible to disable bash's autocomplete on pressing tab?

The reason I want to do this is that I often paste code from an editor where I use the tab character instead of a number of spaces for indention, into my terminal.

And no, you can't convince me to use spaces instead of tabs.

Solution 1

put

 set disable-completion on

string in ~/.inputrc and restart your shell. it will disable completion at all.

Solution 2

Dennis' solution

bind 'set disable-completion on'

can be done on the fly in Bash as well. You do not need to put it in .bashrc.

Musta's solution (bash --noediting) works but also disables command line editing.

Another way is

bind -u complete

(unset key binding associated with 'complete')

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html, 4.2 Bash Builtin Commands.

Solution 3

To disable Bash tab completion only temporarily you can start a Bash with the --noediting option:

alias noed='bash --noediting'

Comments

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

In zsh, the Tab key inserts a tab if you press it at the beginning of a line (before any non-whitespace character). I don't think bash can be programmed for that (you can bind a key to a bash function, but AFAIK you can't trigger a completion from that bash function).

[yrk]

not only in bash though...

[Brian Rasmussen]

To have it only affect Bash, instead of including that line in your ~/.inputrc file, add this to the appropriate shell startup file: bind 'set disable-completion on'

[TheDudeAbides]

The correct answer for the question "how do I temporarily disable Bash completion?" This helps a lot when you're navigating through a directory with 81,000+ files and you can't even Ctrl+C without waiting two minutes for Bash to come back with a prompt.

[db-inf]

disable-completion is a readline option, not a bash option. As far as I can check, it does not disable tab completion when copying code to a bash shell.