30 years of GNU [LWN.net]

30 years of GNU

Posted Oct 3, 2013 11:15 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: 30 years of GNU by gmaxwell
Parent article: 30 years of GNU

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.

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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".