Is there a way to set the tab key to simply insert the tab character in a notebook? I often find the sometimes mysterious "features" bound to that key detrimental.


Question: Bash filename tab completion
Answer: java has a separate auto-completion script that overrides the default completion mechanism. On my distribution (Arch Linux), it is installed in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/java.

To override the behaviour of tab-completion, you could create such a script. If you just want to have all .class files ignored for every command, you could set the FIGNORE variable (e.g. in your ~/.bashrc). Example: FIGNORE=.class. From the manual page of bash:


  FIGNORE
  A  colon-separated  list  of  suffixes to ignore when performing filename completion (see READLINE below).  A filename whose suffix matches one of the entries in FIGNORE is excluded from the list of matched filenames.  A sample value is ".o:~".