How to disable double tab to show available commands in Bash?

Question

Is there a way to disable the double tab key behaviour (pressing tab twice shows available commands in Bash)?

Answer 1

Bash uses readline for completion and key bindings. You can set your own options in ~/.inputrc, and system wide options in /etc/inputrc. If these do not exist, you can create them yourself. These are read at shell login, so changes you make are not in effect until you create a new login shell.

If you want to disable completion entirely, you can use a typical GNU "yes to no":

set disable-completion on

If you want completion, but just not with tab, you can bind tab to insert itself:

TAB: self-insert

This will allow you to still use completion with ESC ESC, or you can bind completion to another key of your liking, e.g. C-t:

TAB: self-insert
C-t: complete

There is a huge amount of customization you can do; I refer you to the Readline and Bash documentation for more information.

Answer 2

You can pick and choose the key mappings you wish to disable without having to turn off autocomplete.

Example: To disable autocomplete for multiple Esc key presses add the following to your ~/.inputrc:

"\e\e": ""

Read the "Readline" section of the bash man page for detailed information.

Answer 3

You can disable autocompletion completely. Some information:

I depends on what exactly do you want to do.

If you just want to disable advanced autocompletion you can either use "complete -r" or remove /etc/bash_completion*

Reading the man page for "complete" might help here. It's a shell thing, it really doesn't have anything to do with a particular distro or another.

Answer 4

Another possibility - disable bash (and friends) entirely! There are plenty of other shells to use on Linux.