How can I make bash tab completion behave like vim tab completion and cycle through matching matches?

Question

I\'ve been meaning to find a solution for this for YEARS.

I am sooo much more productive in vim when manipulating files than bash for this reason.

If I have<

Answer 1

On top of

# cycle forward
Control-k: menu-complete
# cycle backward
Control-j: menu-complete-backward

you may also consider adding

# display one column with matches
set completion-display-width 1

This way you would preserve the current Tab functionality and make bash display the possibilities in one column. So instead of

file_12340983421 file_12390983421 file_12390986421 file_12391983421

you would get

file_12340983421
file_12390983421
file_12390986421
file_12391983421

P.S. You can get up to date readline library from this The GNU Readline Library website.