Click on a completion to select it. In this buffer, type RET to select the completion near point. I did a `C-x C-f TAB TAB' in a directory with the file names shown below. And the output was not very pretty: Possible completions are: ../ ./ 1 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 4 40 41 41.~1~ 42 48 48.~1~ 49 49.~1~ 50 51 52 53 53.~1~ 54 55 55.~1~ 55.~2~ 55.~3~ 55.~4~ 56 57 58 59 6 60 61 62 63 64 64.~1~ 65 66 67 68 69 7 70 70.~1~ 71 72 8 9 Hm. I'm not sure that will show up, because it's just spaces and TABs used to display this, so I guess the problem has something to do with TAB handling. Here's an image instead: