I essentially solved these problems with fish shell and Julia programming language. For all sorts of interactive stuff I use fish, because it works the way you

I essentially solved these problems with fish shell and Julia programming language. For all sorts of interactive stuff I use fish, because it works the way you want for the most common tasks. I can use it to really quickly match and get back previous statements or do a completion. Also much easier to configure and grok than bash, because it has saner syntax and is a simpler shell language. However when writing shell scripts I use a real language like Julia. It integrates very well with the shell world so I don't find it problematic to do this. It is very easy to read output from processes and pipe stuff. Much nicer than say Python or Ruby. You got built in syntax to deal with shell stuff, but then didn't make it crazy so you end up with a mess like perl. Julia is actually a very clean and nice language. Which also happens to blistering fast and have LISP style macros.