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I have a somewhat uncomfortable keyboard on my laptop, resulting in that I sometimes misspell things in Bash and when pressing Tab for an auto-completion nothing happens.

Is it possible to have Bash guess what I meant to type, by for example when wanting to change directory to Documents and then mistyping cd ocum[TAB], given no other folder beginning with "ocum" is present, Bash interprets it as cd Documents/ since it is the closest possible action to do?

Or is this idea terribly complicated to achieve?

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  • Guessing is hard for computers; could you come up with some patterns you’d like it to try? For example, substituting a missing initial character. Commented Jan 29, 2018 at 0:02
  • I think in most cases this guessing mechanism would be helpful is when actually changing directories. That is when I type sluggish and in a hurry. Following the example above, cd *ments* does what I want. But using wildcards every time kind of beats the purpose of doing things fast. Commented Jan 29, 2018 at 15:56
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    It's not terribly complicated. The Z shell, if configured to do so, can do exactly the completion described in the question. Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 13:23
  • zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'b:=*' Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 18:35

1 Answer 1

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On github there's an 11K fuzzy_bash_completion script that appears to match some of the spec:

For example:

mkdir pizza
mkdir jazz
cd zz<TAB>
# displays `pizza' and `jazz'
rm -r jazz
cd zz<TAB>
# completes the word `pizza'
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  • I tested it, and it does the job Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 23:02

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