It's funny how little things like this affect where you go with systems. On the uni systems, emacs was set up to reformat your code by default (as you typed it in). This drove me bananas, and I didn't realise it was configurable. So I went off and found another editor, and I'm still using it.

I think the biggest worry is that if you need to do something like boot into single user mode for an emergency recovery, and /usr or /usr/local (with root's shell in it) is on a different or unmountable partition then you will not be able to do anything.

This is a really bad place to be.

With zsh you even get tab completion of ports, packages, and other command specific arguments.

Personally I run Ubuntu on my work desktop so I can focus on work and not managing the OS. I run a private irc server on a busted old desktop running Arch Linux for the opposite reason :)

However, in the FreeBSD ports tree, I guarantee you there is a bash package you can install, and then you can just switch your shell to be bash instead of sh.

The default root shell on FreeBSD is csh (tcsh) [1] and has been that way for at least 21 years (at least if I read the revision history [2] correctly, my own memories only go back about some 15 years).

As per Wikipedia article, tcsh natively supports tab completion since about 1983 [3] (which I can confirm always worked without an issue as far as my memories go, so again, give or take 15 years).

Permanently switching any user shell to tcsh (if it happens to be sh) is pretty much a single `chsh` command away, so as far as strictly tab completion goes, manual installation of bash is not required at all.

The required steps (step) to setup tcsh for tab completion can be found i.e. in this 2004 FAQ [4]:

Tip#7: List possible completions

I often see Bash users complain that Tcsh does not give a list of completions with the tab key. This is not true. Not only can Tcsh list complentions, but it can do it in color. Just add this to your ~/.tcshrc

set autolist set color set colorcat

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/shells.h...

[2] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/etc/master.passwd

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcsh

[4] http://www.tcsh.org/TipsAndTricks

Also want to add that csh comes stock with historical auto completion which I very much enjoy.

Typing "tail " and pushing the up arrow will auto complete with the last command you typed starting with "tail ".

/bin/sh in 10.x has tab completion.

I didn't see tab completion when I was running the installer and I gave up.

Thank you for answering my question.

    set -o emacs