Setting up bash completion

This guide walks through setting up conda tab completion in bash.

Prerequisites

• conda 25.1 or later

• bash 4.0 or later. Bash 4.4 or later preserves completion ordering more consistently because it supports compopt -o nosort.

Install conda-completion

conda install -c conda-forge conda-completion

Activate completion

Option A: automatic install

conda completion install

This detects the current shell and adds a delimited block to your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile if that exists). Preview with --dry-run:

conda completion install --dry-run

Option B: manual setup

Add this line to your ~/.bashrc:

eval "$(conda completion init bash)"

Verify

Open a new terminal (or run source ~/.bashrc) and try:

$ conda <TAB><TAB>
activate     clean        config       create       ...
install      list         remove       update       ...

$ conda inst<TAB>
$ conda install

$ conda install --<TAB>
--channel     --dry-run     --name        --prefix      ...

How it works in bash

The generated script defines a _conda_completion function and registers it via complete -o default -F _conda_completion conda. On each TAB press, bash calls this function which invokes the Rust binary with:

• ${COMP_WORDS[@]} (the current command line words)

• $COMP_CWORD (the index of the word being completed)

The binary returns one candidate per line and bash populates COMPREPLY.

Uninstall

conda completion uninstall

This removes the delimited block from your RC file, leaving everything else intact.