Setting the Completion Character

Aug 7, 2001

Whenever I set up a new machine (which happens a lot as WinXP and .NET go through their beta & RC cycles), I always need to manually set up the completion character (to TAB, of course) in the Registry. Shawn VanNess posted a .rgs file that would set this up without the lengthy search through the Registry. Inspired by Shawn, here’s my own completionChar.reg that doesn’t require a program to parse .rgs files (which doesn’t come with Windows).

BTW, if you don’t know about the command shell’s Completion Character, stop right now, run the completionChar.reg file, start up a WinNT/Win2K/WinXP command shell, type “cd c:\p[TAB]” and watch while the shell expands it to “cd C:\Program Files" for you. If you have other directories that start with “c:\p”, continue to hit [TAB] to cycle through them. This works for any directory or file name and it boosts my productivity by about 100% on the command line. I can’t live without it!