Not a big deal, but since the solution to this problem wasn't immediate to find, it's probably worth writing it down. Symptom : when you try to tab complete a command, you see a message like this: vi /et-sh: Cause : You're using sh, not bash, so even if tab completion is enabled on ~/.bashrc, it won't be available to you. Solution : change the default shell for the current user from sh to bash with chsh -s /bin/bash That's it.