Bash/zsh tab autocomplete: Given initial command, ignore certain files in directory with autocomplete

Question

What I'm asking is a little bit specific, and might be a different than other autocomplete questions on Unix Stackexchange.

Suppose I have a directory that looks like this

-rw-r--r-- 1 hlin117 staff 1.1K Sep 19 13:05 doc.aux
-rw-r--r-- 1 hlin117 staff  26K Sep 19 13:05 doc.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 hlin117 staff 177K Sep 19 13:05 doc.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 hlin117 staff  13K Sep 19 13:01 doc.tex

It makes very little sense to try doing vim doc.pdf, and in the common case, I wouldn't be doing vim doc.log or vim doc.aux. Instead, I'd often do

vim doc.tex

Unfortunately, tab-autocomplete will suggest to me all 4 files instead of only doc.tex.

Is there a way where I could type vim \t, and this would ignore some certain files in my directory?

More generally, can I type command X \t, and write some setting where typing command X will ignore files in my directory?

FYI: I use zsh. Not sure whether bash and zsh will have similar solutions.

Answer 1

In zsh, with the “new” completion system (i.e. if you have compinit in your .zshrc), use the file-patterns style.

zstyle ':completion:*:*:vim:*' file-patterns '^*.(aux|log|pdf):source-files' '*:all-files'

Files matching the pattern *.(aux|log|pdf) will only be completed on the vim command line if there would otherwise be no completion.

You can use a pattern for the command name, in particular * to match all commands except the ones that are matched explicitly.

Answer 2

Adding to this because I don't use zsh, and there is much more general option.

Just place in your .bashrc a line using the bash builtin command complete. For example:

complete -f -X '*.@(aux|log|pdf)' -o plusdirs vim

where -f will complete filenames, -X filters out matching patterns from the possible choices with a glob string, and -o plusdirs will afterward add subdirectories to the list.