In bash when using tab completion, the first press of the tab key lists out all of the completions:
$ touch forty-one forty-two one
$ ls <TAB>
forty-one forty-two one
Pressing tab again doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t know which of the presented
options you are after. In the above example if you were to press f then press
tab again it will autocomplete anything that is unambiguous. In this case:
$ ls forty-
Zsh is different though, when there are no unambiguous choices it behaves
closer to CMD.COM for windows where each press of the tab cycles through
available options:
$ ls forty-one<TAB>
$ ls forty-two<TAB>
$ ls one<TAB>
Pressing tab until the option I’m after is selected feels much slower to me
than partially completing and asking for more input. It gets worse when there
is a significant number of available options. To change zsh to behave more like
Bash you can use the automenu option:
echo setopt noautomenu >> ~/.zshrc