Sensible Bash

An attempt at saner Bash defaults. Inspired by Tim Pope's sensible.vim.

The config

Sensible Bash is intended to be a simple starting point for a better Bash experience out of the box. Refer to source for a complete list of all the options. Here's a taste of what's in the configuration:

1. Smarter tab completion

Options to improve on Bash's default tab completion. These settings get Bash to:

• Perform file completion in a case insensitive fashion;
• Treat hyphens and underscores as equivalent;
• Display matches for ambiguous patterns at the first press of the tab key (instead of requiring two tab-presses).

2. Sane history defaults

Some tweakings to the command history, mostly taken from Tom Ryder's article Better Bash History. These options will get Bash to:

• Append to the history file instead of overwriting it;
• Save multi-line commands as one command;
• Record each line as it gets issued;
• Keep track of a bigger history;
• Avoid duplicate entries;
• Avoid recording unneeded commands (exit, ls, bg, fg, and history itself);
• Make use of a timestamp format that is actually useful.

3. Better directory navigation

Options to make file system navigation blazingly fast:

• Prepend cd to directory names automatically, so you can cd into directories just by typing their name;
• Automatically correct spelling errors during tab-completion;
• Automatically correct spelling errors in arguments supplied to cd;
• CDPATH defines where cd will look for targets—the default is the current working directory, but you can add directories you want to have fast access to (ex: projects, repos, documents...)
• cdable_vars allows you to define paths as variables and cd into it from wherever you are in the file system, kind of like a bookmarking system for Bash.

Usage

You can copy sensible.bash in your bashrc, cherry-pick the options you like most, or source the file at the top of your bashrc:

if [ -f ~/bin/sensible.bash ]; then
   source ~/bin/sensible.bash
fi

Note: Make sure you're running at least Bash 4.x or some options may not work. Keep your software up-to-date!

Note for OS X users

If you're using OS X, I recommend to follow Josh Staiger's advice and source bashrc from bash_profile so to keep all your configuration in one place.

Contributing

Consider this as a work in progress where everything is open for discussion. Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request if you think I've missed something important. Same goes for options you think should be removed.

See also

• My article about Sensible Bash
• My dotfiles for more *nix configuration goodies
• Unix as IDE, my ebook port of the excellent post series by Tom Ryder

License

MIT