I'm moving away from Windows (yay!) and need to bring a few features with me. Microsoft added this auto complete feature to PowerShell recently and I need something similar:

I found this package which is helpful, but it requires you to hit tab before you get a list of suggested commands: https://wiki.debian.org/Add%20Bash%20Completion

Do I need a different shell entirely? I'm using bash on Debian now.

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[–] 17 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

Use fish as your command line shell, it's doing exactly that and way more.

It's so intuitive and useful that I forgot that it was not part of the standard shell.

https://fishshell.com/assets/img/screenshots/autosuggestion.webp

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    I recommend starship in combination with fish

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Definitely doable with zsh plugins. There are some options for bash like this but ive never used them

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Tab completion is the thing on linux, you can probably get something similar with zsh and it's plugins, maybe with fish too.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've not encountered this for bash.

    The usual recommendation is to use Ctrl+r and do lookups when you need them.

    Auto-suggestions are built into the fish shell and easily added to zsh. I haven't explored beyond those in a long time.

    I hesitate to recommend changing shells for a newbie, but plenty of distros are using alternatives out of the box (usually zsh).

    The typical journey for a newbie power user is a switch to zsh and an installation of oh-my-zsh, and then you can install zsh-autosuggestions as a plugin.

    I wouldn't recommend fish shell to you yet, but only because you're new enough on your journey to be copy-pasting and fish isn't posix compliant which could throw you off occasionally. (This will probably bait some fish fanatics).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Is Ctrl+R good enough for you? I use it all the time.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    You could be a mad lad like me and run PowerShell on Linux and as long as you have the PSReadline module you'll get this autocomplete. As others mentioned fish is also a great shell and I think with oh-my-bash and oh-my-zsh bash and zsh can do this as well.

    I don't know if it has it but Nushell might also have something similar and feel a bit more natural coming from pwsh.

    tldr; You can stick with pwsh or have tons of alternative options!

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