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30 years of GNU

30 years of GNU

Posted Oct 3, 2013 5:16 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)
In reply to: 30 years of GNU by k8to
Parent article: 30 years of GNU

It probably would have been really awesome if it were just on another key instead of replacing the nice deterministic one. I've personally never found it useful, but I could imagine that someone might. My frustration was that I found that it greatly degraded something that was useful to everyone, and resulted in some unwelcome techsupport burden when it hit other people that haven't turned it off yet.

The responses here about using alt-/ to get the explicable behavior back are great. I'm not sure how I ever would have discovered that, since that difference in behavior is not pointed out in the bash man-page.


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30 years of GNU

Posted Oct 3, 2013 6:45 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I don't remember how I learned it. I think it might have been in the README.Debian files for the bash completion package that I had to manually install.

bash's command line behavior is a complicated interplay between libreadline and bash and your configfiles. It's pretty hard to learn about in general.

30 years of GNU

Posted Oct 3, 2013 11:15 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The responses here about using alt-/ to get the explicable behavior back are great. I'm not sure how I ever would have discovered that, since that difference in behavior is not pointed out in the bash man-page.

Really? That's strange: it's explained here:
$ man bash

      complete-filename (M-/)
             Attempt filename completion on the text before point.

One of the best things WRT GNU project is it's documentation: it's usually pretty well-written. At least user-facing one. Bash is not an exception.

P.S. There are many different way to complete your text in bash: as a filename, as a variable, as a username and so on. And of course TAB always meant “smart completion”. Only usually it was less “smart” than it is today.

30 years of GNU

Posted Oct 4, 2013 22:47 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> And of course TAB always meant “smart completion”. Only usually it was less “smart” than it is today.

Which means it Just Worked.

I did not realize this was called "smart completion". Now I completely understand the connection with Microsoft Word where the very first required is to immediately disable all the so-called "smart" features ("smart" quotes, "smart" initials, "smart" selection,...) in order to be allowed to type anything unusual that Microsoft did not expect.

Exactly the same kind of "smartness".

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