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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.

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1
  • 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).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 21, 2012 at 14:39

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
18

put 

 set disable-completion on

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

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4
  • not only in bash though...
    – yrk
    Jan 19, 2012 at 20:07
  • 8
    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'
    – Dennis Williamson
    Jan 19, 2012 at 20:13
  • 1
    What Dennis said, and the appropriate startup file is ~/.bashrc (if it doesn't take in login shells, add source ~/.bashrc to ~/.bash_profile).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 20, 2012 at 22:51
  • 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.
    – db-inf
    Nov 16, 2021 at 22:58
11

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.

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1
  • 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.
    – TheDudeAbides
    Nov 21, 2018 at 23:07
7

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

alias noed='bash --noediting'
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1

With terminals supporting bracketed paste (i.e. most modern terminals) you can run bind 'set enable-bracketed-paste on' to skip readline handling of the pasted code:

user@host:~$ bind 'set enable-bracketed-paste off'
user@host:~$ STR="Foo
> 
Display all 2376 possibilities? (y or n)^C
user@host:~$ bind 'set enable-bracketed-paste on' 
user@host:~$ STR="Foo
        Bar"
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