Tab autocompletion and history in tcsh

Question

I use tcsh, and I'd like to set up the following behaviour, which I've seen on some systems in the past. If I type

!string TAB

then:

If the history contains a unique entry beginning with string, autocompletion should take place, and I can edit the resulting command, or just press return to execute it.
If the history contains multiple entries beginning with string, a list of possible completions is displayed, the command is partially completed as far as possible (without eliminating any possibilities from the list), and on the command line I should have an exclamation mark followed by the partially completed command, so that I can type more characters and press TAB again.

How do I achieve this?

Ian Thompson · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-02 19:16:38Z

2

Add

set autoexpand

to .tcshrc to activate this feature.

answered Dec 2 '12 at 19:16

Ian Thompson

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andcoz · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-24 12:21:13Z

1

Probably, you are searching for history-search-backward and history-search-forward editor commands.

As default, these commands are binded to M-p (usually alt+p on pc keyboards) and M-n (alt+n).

You can re-bind them to any other key sequence using bindkey command. E.g.:

 bindkey '\t' history-search-backward

Note that you do not need to place a ! at line beginning to use these commands.

answered Aug 23 '11 at 15:35

andcoz

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No, that's something different. – Ian Thompson Aug 24 '11 at 9:31
@infoclogged thank you, I fixed the typo in the example – andcoz Jun 24 '15 at 12:23

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2 Answers 2