Other people have shared improvements to Bash's default autocomplete behaviour; here's mine, specifically addressing the criticisms that you have to hit tab twi

Other people have shared improvements to Bash's default autocomplete behaviour; here's mine, specifically addressing the criticisms that you have to hit tab twice and the pollution of terminal history: # Complete unambiguously on first tab, then show completions set show-all-if-unmodified on (These settings go into your ~/.inputrc file.) This means that if I hit tab for the first time, Bash will autocomplete as far as the completion isn't ambiguous; single keypress, no history pollution. If I then hit tab again, I get a list of the possible completions. The other single biggest improvement over default behaviour for me is this: # Replace common prefix with ellipsis for completion set completion-prefix-display-length 2 This will make the list of completions omit the part they all have in common. The combined behaviour is then like this: for a directory with a few files, $ ls file1 file2 file3 I can start typing: $ cat f Now, hitting tab (just once) gets me the unambiguous part: $ cat file Hitting it again shows me the possible completions with the common part replaced by an ellipsis: $ cat file ...1 ...2 ...3 $ cat file