Screen and Cygwin: no tab completion?

Question

I'm having some problems working with my development environment. Specifically, after I invoke the screen utility from within Cygwin I lose the ability to do tab completion. Before I invoke screen however tab completion works just fine.

I messed around with setting different values for the TERM env variable (VT100, xterm etc) but without success. It must be something trivial but I have no idea anymore. Does StackOverflow have any suggestions for me?

Answer 1

when you issue 'screen' from inside cygwin it might put you in another shell like /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash (and bash is where you're getting the tab completion from).

To fix the problem you could edit your .screenrc file (found in your home directory) and add in this line:

shell bash

Then try running screen again and you should see tab completion work within this new window.