Autocomplete in MySQL on Windows

Question

Does anyone know if there is a way to make autocomplete work in the MySQL Command Line Client under Windows? It works fine under Linux for me, but just moves the cursor under Windows.

Answer 1

This should work as follows:

C:\> mysql --auto-rehash 

Or configure my.cnf:

 [mysql] auto-rehash 

edit: My apologies. I found some links that the tab completion function in the mysql client only works on UNIX / Linux. It does not work on Windows.

update: The reason for this is briefly mentioned in MySQL error # 4731 :

[July 31, 2004 12:47 PM] Sergey Golubchik

I just downloaded 4.0.15 - the command termination in mysql.exe is NOT as expected. This was never working in mysql.exe, because we were not able to make readline to compile with VC ++.

mysqlc.exe is a cygwin assembly and it is associated with readline.

Explanation: GNU readline is an open source standard library for handling user input. The MySQL team uses the readline library, but they are not its author. From the comment above, I understand that they were unsuccessful in compiling the readline library on Windows with Microsoft Visual C ++, the tool they use to create the MySQL product. Some open source projects were not fully compatible with the Microsoft Windows environment.

Sometime in the past, the MySQL product provided an alternative client, which they called mysqlc.exe , which they compiled using the cygwin toolkit on Windows, but they no longer provide this. The cygwin toolkit includes the readline library, so it was possible to compile the mysqlc.exe client with support for tab completion.

So, theoretically, if you are truly fearless, you can download the cygwin toolkit, including the readline library, and then download the MySQL source code and build it using cygwin. Then you should have a mysql client program that can do tabs. But this seems like a lot of work even for those who are familiar with building MySQL from source code.

Answer 2

This is probably not what you are looking for, but the corporate version of SQLYog offers somewhat limited automatic schema termination.

Answer 3

If dosen't works above and you use widnows 10, you can install the linux shell and then install mysql-client and connect as in a terminal on Linux where the autocomplex works.

Instruction: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10