More Useful Bash/Terminal Settings

A few more tricks to make your bash environment better. As always, add them to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile to enable.

Disable the pagination of long lists when ambiguously tab completing.

bind 'set page-completions off'

Increase max returned items before being prompted. (ie, “Display all 380 possibilities? (y or n”). You can set the number to whatever you’d like.

bind 'set completion-query-items 300'

Show the list of autocompletion options after the first tab. This prevents the beep + second tab behavior.

bind 'set show-all-if-ambiguous on'

When autocompleting for cd or rmdir, list only directories as choices.

complete -d cd rmdir

Autocompletion for ssh known_hosts. Add this to your ~/.ssh/config (if the file doesn’t exist, create it)

Host *
HashKnownHosts no

Make grep highlight the matching terms in its output.

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'

Ignore case for case preserving but insensitive filesystems (like HFS+). I don’t personally use this, but perhaps some people will like it.

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on'

Don’t show hidden files when listing. Another option I don’t personally use.

bind 'set match-hidden-files off'