Make Terminal’s autocompletion case-insensitive in Ubuntu

After seeing how to cycle through Terminal’s autocomplete options using the TAB key, here’s how to get rid of another minor annoyance (for some). The autocompletion in Terminal is case-sensitive; if you have a directory called Downloads in your home directory, writing

cd dow

and pressing TAB will not auto-complete to cd Downloads/ 

To remedy this for the current Terminal session only, run this:

set completion-ignore-case On

More likely though, you’ll want to make this permanent. Run these in Terminal (courtesy of this post):

# If ~./inputrc doesn't exist yet, first include the original /etc/inputrc so we don't override it
if [ ! -a ~/.inputrc ]; then echo "\$include /etc/inputrc" > ~/.inputrc; fi 

# Add option to ~/.inputrc to enable case-insensitive tab completion
echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

To change this for all users, edit /etc/inputrc and add this line:

set completion-ignore-case On

You might have to restart Terminal, but after that you’re set. Happy tabbing.

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