4 ms·

Actually natural language scales quite well. Aza Raskin and his father Jeff did a lot of good work in this area. The discoverability of commands in a system li

Actually natural language scales quite well. Aza Raskin and his father Jeff did a lot of good work in this area. The discoverability of commands in a system like Emacs is much more powerful than a menu based system. In fact, I bet most people navigate the web now days by typing part of the URL in the omni bar and letting the browser fuzzy match versus mainting large bookmark lists.

ssorallen 8y ago
I’m accustomed to typing “s” for StackOverflow, “g” for GitHub, “gm” for Gmail, and probably several others I don’t even realize. This sort of “smart” / reachable interface seems like an improvement over having to type entire words over and over. Is there a terminal with similar ability?
- akx 8y ago
  Fish's abbr feature does this. They're aliases that expand in place. For example I have gph abbr'd to "git push origin HEAD", and I can continue editing the command after expansion.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Is there a way to expand special commands (and optionally aliases) in BASH without executing them. Like if I put `ll !$` it would show, say, `ls -al /home/user/downloads` on a new line. I'd love tab style completion that offered explicit history as well as standard completions. So if I `find` and then press the completion key-combo I get a list of the last 10 unique find commands (and I can choose one and edit before running).
    - 0x445442 8y ago
      This may be possible with fzf but I'm not sure of all the features it's capable of. This type of behavior would be a great addition to the terminal or popular shells. Instead of having the command prompt always display at the end of output, have it stay in the same place at the top or bottom. Something like you get with the Emacs mini-buffer with tools like helm but for the terminal.
- b0rsuk 8y ago
  Actually I got this by turning OFF fuzzy search. I don't use bookmarks anymore. I just type gi<DOWNARROW> or gm<DOWNARROW>, or st<DOWNARROW> and press enter.
- xaedes 8y ago
  I use ctrl+r for this.
jasonm23 8y ago
Emacs + Smex makes the M-x command discovery even more effective.

ssorallen 8y ago

I’m accustomed to typing “s” for StackOverflow, “g” for GitHub, “gm” for Gmail, and probably several others I don’t even realize. This sort of “smart” / reachable interface seems like an improvement over having to type entire words over and over. Is there a terminal with similar ability?

akx 8y ago
Fish's abbr feature does this. They're aliases that expand in place. For example I have gph abbr'd to "git push origin HEAD", and I can continue editing the command after expansion.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Is there a way to expand special commands (and optionally aliases) in BASH without executing them. Like if I put `ll !$` it would show, say, `ls -al /home/user/downloads` on a new line. I'd love tab style completion that offered explicit history as well as standard completions. So if I `find` and then press the completion key-combo I get a list of the last 10 unique find commands (and I can choose one and edit before running).
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    This may be possible with fzf but I'm not sure of all the features it's capable of. This type of behavior would be a great addition to the terminal or popular shells. Instead of having the command prompt always display at the end of output, have it stay in the same place at the top or bottom. Something like you get with the Emacs mini-buffer with tools like helm but for the terminal.
b0rsuk 8y ago
Actually I got this by turning OFF fuzzy search. I don't use bookmarks anymore. I just type gi<DOWNARROW> or gm<DOWNARROW>, or st<DOWNARROW> and press enter.
xaedes 8y ago
I use ctrl+r for this.

jasonm23 8y ago

Emacs + Smex makes the M-x command discovery even more effective.