Enabling Git shell completions in OSX

Hard to believe I survived so long with Git in the shell without setting up auto-completion features in Mac OS X. But that’s what happened! At last, I got annoyed by some longish remote names and some longish branch names, to the point that gave me the right push.

I have an oldish PC, with Snow Leopard and MacPorts. Based on this article on superuser.com, it seemed pretty simple to do:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install git-core +bash_completion

You have to pay attention to the output of these commands. Somewhere in the middle the install step mentioned that the completion features will only work in Bash version >= 4.1. Checking what I have at hand:

$ echo $BASH_VERSION 
3.2.48(1)-release
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$ which bash
/opt/local/bin/bash
$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.2.45(2)-release (i386-apple-darwin10.8.0)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

So my current shell is /bin/bash, version 3.2, but a 4.2 version exists already in my system at /opt/local/bin/bash. Let’s change my shell:

$ chsh -s /opt/local/bin/bash
Changing shell for janos.
Password for janos: 
chsh: /opt/local/bin/bash: non-standard shell

It didn’t work, apparently because the shell I specified is “not standard”. According to the man page of chsh, standard shells are the ones listed in /etc/shells. This Bash 4 was installed by MacPorts, and I do mean it as a standard shell, so let’s add it to the list:

echo /opt/local/bin/bash | sudo tee -a /etc/shells

After this I could change my shell, and in a new terminal window or tab I could start enjoying auto-completion in Git commands, yeay! Most importantly in operations with remotes and branches.

Enabling Git shell completions in OSX —25 February 2014