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When I am running Git Bash, I occasionally accidentally press CTRL+I and this freezes up the terminal for quite a long time, before releasing.

I have tried CTRL+D, CTRL+Q, CTRL+C thereafter, but to no avail.

My only options at present are to simply wait or to forcefully close the Git Bash window. Neither of which are acceptable.

Does anyone know what CTRL+I is doing? And is there an easy way to cancel it after accidentally pressing it?

kostix
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ManoDestra
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1 Answers1

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As wildplasser said in a comment, CTRL+I is the same as TAB. In bash, the tab key invokes the tab completion code, which searches around to see what words fit with whatever you have typed so far. On Unix-y systems this is generally pretty fast. Apparently it's horribly slow on your system. You might be able to speed it up, but if all else fails, you can just disable it.

See also git bash auto complete slow on windows 7 x64, https://blog.entelect.co.za/view/7554/speed-up-git-bash-on-windows, and https://superuser.com/questions/421397/disable-bashs-programmable-autocompletion-based-on-command.

torek
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  • Tab completion is programmable. It's likely that hitting Tab at that particular point invoked some search code that took a very long time to execute. A simple case might be when the shell expects a file name and you it Tab while in a directory containing a huge number of files. More likely, it might be invoking some `git` command that happens to take a very long time. (You could have the same symptom on a UNIX-like system if tab completion happens to invoke some very slow command.) – Keith Thompson Aug 30 '17 at 22:53
  • @KeithThompson: Yes; the last link is about disabling it in general, while the first two links are concerned with making the Git-specific completions go faster on Windows 7 (may or may not apply to Windows 10; I don't know, I don't do Windows...). – torek Aug 30 '17 at 22:54
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    @torek Yes, this is Git Bash on Windows (8). Thanks. This helps a great deal. – ManoDestra Sep 01 '17 at 14:24