this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Powershell is annoyingly good though.
there are other shells that have all the nice powershell things without the weird stuff (at least for not windows people), like nushell
although I wouldn't be surprised if powershell was the thing that started the trend of better shells
Random question for everyone from a bit of a noob. When I'm using Powershell (PS) in windows I can start to type the name of a built in command or one I have added to PATH and then press tab to auto complete the command. That part works the same in my Linux terminal.
What I can also do after I have typed that command into PS is start to type a file name that exists in the directory that PS is working in and then press tab to auto complete or cycle through the files that match and it even formats the name of the file correctly (meaning if it has a space in the name it will wrap the name in quotes so that it is understood by the commands they are fed to). This auto completing of file names even works on files that were created after the PS window was opened. This functionality doesn't seem to exist by default in any distro I have used. Is it possible to do this in the Linux terminal?
Although I have done some distro hopping, most of them have ultimately been Ubuntu based. Currently running Kubuntu.
By default Bash will auto complete filenames (In fact, in 25 years, i can't remember the time bash didn't). Sometimes, there are autocomplete 'helpers' that try to be overly smart (ie, only autocompleting files that have the right extension, which can interfere when you are doing creative things with mis-named file). However, in Powershell, cmdlets declare a type for each of their parameters, which lets powershell autocomplete the right type of item, which can make it a bit more magical and reliable.