Sensible Bash

An attempt at saner Bash defaults. Inspired by Tim Pope's sensible.vim.

The config

Sensible Bash is intended to be a simple starting point for a better Bash user experience out of the box.

Refer to the commented source for a complete list of all the options with explanations. Here's a taste:

Readline bindings to improve on Bash's default tab completion:

Perform file completion in a case insensitive fashion
Treat hyphens and underscores as equivalent
Display matches for ambiguous patterns at the first press of the tab key (instead of requiring two tab-presses)

Sensible defaults for the command history:

Append to the history file instead of overwriting it
Save multi-line commands as one command
Record each line as it gets issued
Keep track of a bigger history
Avoid duplicate entries
Avoid recording unneeded commands (exit, ls, bg, fg, and history itself)
Use a standard ISO 8601 timestamp for recording commands (ex: 2016-04-09 13:06:31)

Read more about the settings used here in the article Better Bash History by Tom Ryder.

Options that considerably speed up the ability to navigate throughout the file system:

Prepend cd to directory names automatically, so you can change to a directory just by typing its name
Automatically correct spelling errors during tab-completion and in arguments supplied to cd
Set more targets to the cd command besides the current working directory (ex: projects, repos, documents, etc)
Define paths as variables and cd into it from anywhere, kind of like a bookmarking system for Bash (cdable_vars)

You can copy sensible.bash in your bashrc, cherry-pick the options you like, or source the file at the top of your bashrc:

if [ -f ~/bin/sensible.bash ]; then
   source ~/bin/sensible.bash
fi

In order to get Sensible Bash to work correctly, make sure that:

You're running at least Bash 4.x (echo $BASH_VERSION).
You have the Bash Completion package installed and properly configured on your system.
If you're on macOS, I recommend to follow Josh Staiger's advice and source bashrc from bash_profile so to keep all your configuration in one place.