Bug 158614

Summary: Small wish for tab autocompletion
Product: [Applications] konsole Reporter: Bill Robert <bobbug>
Component: generalAssignee: Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG    
Severity: wishlist    
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Ubuntu   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:

Description Bill Robert 2008-03-01 10:00:54 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE 3.5.9)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages

This is just a small wish of minor importance but: If you got a file/directory and a symlink to it in the same directory with similar name (e. g. "Programme" and "Program files" in .wine/drive_c) and you type Prog<Tab>, then konsole could autocomplete to "Programme" or "Program files" and not stop at "Program" because this is unnecessary.
Comment 1 Robert Knight 2008-03-01 15:45:04 UTC 
Hello,

The tab auto-completion facilities are provided by the shell - the program which prints out the prompt and interprets and responds to the commands you type in.  This is probably 'bash'.

Konsole itself provides emulator which formats the terminal's output for display, the window and the menus surrounding the display area.

In addition, symlinks are not the same as a directory for some purposes.  For example, you can remove a symlink with "rm" but not a directory.  A symlink's location can later be changed to point to different contents.  So there are reasons why bash doesn't do this automatically.

Some programs have tab completion which works by cycling through possible matches (eg. Vim) as opposed to stopping after the longest common prefix (in your case "Program") and waiting for further input.  I don't know if this is possible in bash however.