JIYIK CN >

This tutorial demonstrates how to enable git tab autocompletion.

Importance of enabling Git Tab auto-completion

When developers work with source code, they mostly prefer Git as it is a very familiar and convenient platform for developers through which they can work on the code very efficiently in a team-based environment.

On every system, when you successfully install Windows on your personal computer, Git is installed by default.

But when it comes to the auto-completion feature, we have to git tab autocompleteenable it manually by enabling which will automatically complete the commands and branch names defined previously.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to install a handy feature in Git called auto-completion. It will help us to automatically type commands, their file paths, and branch names and tags in Git.

We can say that when we start typing a word, we press the Tab key, which will let Git guess the word based on what we have done previously. It also saves us from over-typing or writing entire paragraphs.

If there is more than one possibility for the word to match, then it asks for more information to type the correct word accordingly. We will see how auto-completion works in Git in the next section.

Enable Git Tab auto-completion

First, we will open a shell and go to our home directory, where we will find a script with the famous cd command, as follows:

$ cd script/ folder

Once we have reached the destination folder, we will download the Git autocompletion script into that folder using one of the following methods.

The first method is to download using curl, and the other is to download to a folder using wget. We will see both of these commands below:

Download Git autocompletion using curl:

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash

Download Git autocompletion using wget:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash

Source git-completion file

Bash command:

$ source ~/git-completion.bash

Most likely, we will need to automatically source this file when we want to start a new shell. To do this, we will navigate to the ~/.bashrc file and append the command above.

After you save this file, all new shells will source this file. The symbol (~) indicates the home directory. Do this by restarting the terminal using the administrative mode in the personal computer options.

Let's check that this works correctly by navigating into a Git-controlled directory.

Then enter a few words from the keyboard and press the Tab key and check if the autocomplete is working properly on your PC; the command is as follows:

$ git checkout <tab><tab>

In response to the above command, we will be listed all possible branches that can be checked out after successfully hitting the Tab button.

Like this, we can execute any Git command we have seen in other tutorials as autocompletion and it will work on all supported Git commands without any problems.