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

By default TAB is bound to the complete readline command. Your desired behavior would be menu-complete instead. You can change your readlines settings by editing ~/.inputrc. To rebind TAB, add this line:

TAB: menu-complete

For more details see the READLINE section in man bash.

For bash >= 4 you might like these settings. You can try them directly on the command-line, and put them in your .bashrc if you like them.

# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them

bind 'TAB':menu-complete

# Display a list of the matching files

bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"

# Perform partial completion on the first Tab press,
# only start cycling full results on the second Tab press

bind "set menu-complete-display-prefix on"

This setup is similar to Vim's set wildmode=longest:full:list,full

I pulled these settings from this question on the Unix & Linux site.

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By the way, since you are here, here is another nice pair of bindings:

# Cycle through history based on characters already typed on the line

bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

This means if you type ssh<Up> it will cycle through previous lines where you ran ssh

If you don't like what you got, you can clear the line with Ctrl-K Ctrl-U

I pulled these settings from this question on AskUbuntu.

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.