4 ms·

One thing I find life-changing is to remap the up arrow so that it does not iterates through all commands, but only those starting with the characters I have al

One thing I find life-changing is to remap the up arrow so that it does not iterates through all commands, but only those starting with the characters I have already written. So e.g. I can type `tar -`, then the up arrow, and get the tar parameters that worked last time. In zsh this is configured with bindkey "^[OA" up-line-or-beginning-search # Up bindkey "^[OB" down-line-or-beginning-search # Down

heresie-dabord 7mo ago
> life-changing For further life-changing experience... add aliases to .bash_aliases alias gph='history | grep --colour -i ' alias gpc='grep --colour -Hin ' #if gnu time is installed alias timef='/usr/bin/time -f "tm %E , cpu %P , mem %M" '
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  I've got many like these I copied from various people over the years. One I came up and that I use all the time: alias wl='wc -l' I use it so much I sometimes forget it's not stock.
bwhaley 7mo ago
Once you start using CTRL+r, you may find that you never reach for up arrow again.
- kuschkufan 7mo ago
  And once you want to one-up this look into fzf.
  - nidnogg 7mo ago
    And once you get tired of fzf and want something better, you reach for https://atuin.sh https://atuin.sh. Completely transformed all of my workflows
    - seedie 7mo ago
      From the atuin.sh website > Sync your shell history to all of your machines I think of my shell history as very machine specific. Can you give some insights on how you benefit from history sync? If you use it.
      - Cyphus 7mo ago
        That feature is entirely optional and disabled by default. Atuin stores your shell history locally in a sqlite db regardless of whether you choose to sync it. I thought fzf was fast, but atuin makes it look slow by comparison.
      - foobarian 7mo ago
        Same, I find shared history not very useful. However what I do find useful is eternal history. It's doable with some .bashrc hacks, and slow because it's file based on every command, but: - never delete history - associate history with a session token - set separate tokens in each screen, tmux, whatever session - sort such that backward search (ctrl-R) hits current session history first, and the rest second Like half my corporate brain is in a 11M history file at this point, going back years. What I would love is to integrate this into the shell better so it's using sqlite or similar so it doesn't feel "sluggish." But even now the pain is worth the prize.
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        fragmede 7mo ago
        You don't have to setup shared history with Atuin if you don't want to and that's what's holding you back. Otherwise it hits the rest of your requirements. Just don't hesitate to change from the default config.
        commandersaki 7mo ago
        I just want to give a perspective of someone that uses the 'eternal history' in bash per Eli Bandersky [1] and reluctance to use something like atuin (without/ignoring shared history). First, as for speed and responsiveness, if there is a degradation, it is imperceptible to me. I wouldn't have a clue that my interactive shell is slowing down because it is logging a command to ~/.persistent_history. My persistent_history is 4MB and has been migrated from machine to machine as I've upgraded, it's never felt slow to edit with (neo)vim or search with system supplied grep. Eli's way of doing it also includes the timestamps for all commands, so it's easy to trace back when I had run the command, and duplicates are suppressed. In fact my longest persistent_history goes back to 2019-07-04, so I've been using it for quite some time now. But the larger point I wanted to make is that I wouldn't feel comfortable switching this, in my opinion, quite efficient setup to displace it with an sqlite database. That would require a special tool to drill through the history and search rendering simple unix utilities useless. As Eli suggested, if your history gets too big, simply rotate the file and carry on. I have the alias phgrep to grep ~/.persistent_history, but I can easily have another alias to grep ~/.persistent_history*. [1]: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-history-in-bash https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago
  I'm familiar with ctrl-r, but I still very much like the up-arrow behavior described by that commenter.
  - flir 7mo ago
    Looking at it from a "law of least surprise" angle, it's exactly how it should behave. "I typed 'cd di↑' and you're giving me 'pwd'??"
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    What I love about the default Bash Crtl-C behaviour is that once a command has been located, the bash history is moved to the history of that command, until Enter is pressed. $ a bash: a: command not found $ b bash: b: command not found $ c bash: c: command not found $ d bash: d: command not found $ <CTRL-R> b <UP> $ a That's great if I don't remember which command I was experimenting with, but I do know other commands that I did around that time (usually a file that I edited with VIM).
- BeetleB 7mo ago
  There is a difference, I believe. Doesn't Ctrl+r do a substring search instead?
  - imglorp 7mo ago
    Yes it's different: it will match anywhere in the previous command lines.
- noisy_boy 7mo ago
  export EDITOR=vi and then hitting Esc puts you into vi mode; k, j to move up/down through history or pressing / to search etc including using regex is all available.
- soraminazuki 7mo ago
  Prefix search is faster for the majority of cases. CTRL-r / FZF is useful for the remaining ones.
- twelvedogs 7mo ago
  If you use multiple terminals it kinda sucks unless you do export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' in your.bashrc or something cause only the last closed terminal saves to history
- Zetaphor 7mo ago
  Atuin[1] feels like the best of both worlds to me. [1] https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin
  - annie511266728 7mo ago
    Atuin looks pretty nice — I might give it a try. I went down the “fully automatic history” path before, but it mostly turned into noise for me. Keeping a tiny cheatsheet of things I had to look up twice ended up working better.
- antonvs 7mo ago
  Ctrl-r can’t replace prefix search.
n8henrie 7mo ago
Did this many years ago (but with bash) -- life changing is an apt way of saying it.
- account42 7mo ago
  Here's the Bash commands for this in case anyone is looking for them bind '"\e[A"':history-search-backward bind '"\e[B"':history-search-forward
moebrowne 7mo ago
This can also be achieved with `.inputrc`: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward
- az09mugen 7mo ago
  Thank you !
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
That's a nice one. One thing I do is configure my keyboard so that "modifier+{ijkl}" mimicks the inverted T arrows key cluster. So there's never a need for me to reach for the arrow keys. And {ijk} makes more sense than vi's {hjkl} and is faster/more logical/less key fingers travel. The nice thing is: as I do this at the keyboard level, this works in every single map. "modifier" in my case is "an easily reachable key in a natural hand position on which my left thumb is always resting" but YMMV. I set that up years ago and it works in every app: it's gorgeous. Heck, I'm using it while editing this very message for example. And of course it composes with SHIFT too: it's basically arrow keys, except at the fingers' natural positions.
- aaravchen 7mo ago
  I did the same, starting with Ergo Mode in Emacs many years ago, and ending up today with a programmable split keyboard with those keys as arrows on a layer. For when I'm on a laptop without the keyboard, I have a mishmash of solutions that bind to Alt+{ijkl}
BeetleB 7mo ago
Heh. I've done this since forever, but I use PgUp and PgDn so I can retain the original meaning of the up arrow key.
- dsp_person 7mo ago
  When I was on ubuntu it was easy to uncomment a couple lines in /etc/inputrc for this
hebelehubele 7mo ago
This is the default `fish` shell behavior. Type anything, up/down keys to iterate through full commands that containing the term; alt + up/down to iterate through args containing the term.
- naikrovek 7mo ago
  Fish is underrated
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
sureglymop 7mo ago
I agree it's a game changer! For bash to do the same I put this in my .inputrc: ## arrow up "\e[A":history-search-backward ## arrow down "\e[B":history-search-forward
- niedzielski 7mo ago
  +1, i found out about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211344 . total game changer.
Fishkins 7mo ago
I do something similar. I leave up and down arrows alone, but have ctrl+p and ctrl+n behave as you describe.
naikrovek 7mo ago
Atuin is better than anything I’ve used in a shell.
zahlman 7mo ago
I'd try this, but I often find that I want to repeat a cycle of two or more commands. Yes, I probably should edit and put them on one line with semicolons (or even make a function), but.
- henrik_w 7mo ago
  Or put && between them - I had "compile;run" and when compile failed, it still ran (but the old build). Took me a while to figure out. && ensures the first command succeeds. Anyway, so worth it to combine commands into one line for easy re-run.
dkga 7mo ago
Very nice! Here's the full code for those that had, like me, a more minimalistic .zshrc: ``` autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search autoload -U down-line-or-beginning-search zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[A" up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[OA" up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[B" down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[OB" down-line-or-beginning-search ```

heresie-dabord 7mo ago

> life-changing For further life-changing experience... add aliases to .bash_aliases alias gph='history | grep --colour -i ' alias gpc='grep --colour -Hin ' #if gnu time is installed alias timef='/usr/bin/time -f "tm %E , cpu %P , mem %M" '

TacticalCoder 7mo ago
I've got many like these I copied from various people over the years. One I came up and that I use all the time: alias wl='wc -l' I use it so much I sometimes forget it's not stock.

bwhaley 7mo ago

Once you start using CTRL+r, you may find that you never reach for up arrow again.

kuschkufan 7mo ago
And once you want to one-up this look into fzf.
- nidnogg 7mo ago
  And once you get tired of fzf and want something better, you reach for https://atuin.sh https://atuin.sh. Completely transformed all of my workflows
  - seedie 7mo ago
    From the atuin.sh website > Sync your shell history to all of your machines I think of my shell history as very machine specific. Can you give some insights on how you benefit from history sync? If you use it.
    - Cyphus 7mo ago
      That feature is entirely optional and disabled by default. Atuin stores your shell history locally in a sqlite db regardless of whether you choose to sync it. I thought fzf was fast, but atuin makes it look slow by comparison.
    - foobarian 7mo ago
      Same, I find shared history not very useful. However what I do find useful is eternal history. It's doable with some .bashrc hacks, and slow because it's file based on every command, but: - never delete history - associate history with a session token - set separate tokens in each screen, tmux, whatever session - sort such that backward search (ctrl-R) hits current session history first, and the rest second Like half my corporate brain is in a 11M history file at this point, going back years. What I would love is to integrate this into the shell better so it's using sqlite or similar so it doesn't feel "sluggish." But even now the pain is worth the prize.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - fragmede 7mo ago
        You don't have to setup shared history with Atuin if you don't want to and that's what's holding you back. Otherwise it hits the rest of your requirements. Just don't hesitate to change from the default config.
      - commandersaki 7mo ago
        I just want to give a perspective of someone that uses the 'eternal history' in bash per Eli Bandersky [1] and reluctance to use something like atuin (without/ignoring shared history). First, as for speed and responsiveness, if there is a degradation, it is imperceptible to me. I wouldn't have a clue that my interactive shell is slowing down because it is logging a command to ~/.persistent_history. My persistent_history is 4MB and has been migrated from machine to machine as I've upgraded, it's never felt slow to edit with (neo)vim or search with system supplied grep. Eli's way of doing it also includes the timestamps for all commands, so it's easy to trace back when I had run the command, and duplicates are suppressed. In fact my longest persistent_history goes back to 2019-07-04, so I've been using it for quite some time now. But the larger point I wanted to make is that I wouldn't feel comfortable switching this, in my opinion, quite efficient setup to displace it with an sqlite database. That would require a special tool to drill through the history and search rendering simple unix utilities useless. As Eli suggested, if your history gets too big, simply rotate the file and carry on. I have the alias phgrep to grep ~/.persistent_history, but I can easily have another alias to grep ~/.persistent_history*. [1]: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-history-in-bash https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...
pavel_lishin 7mo ago
I'm familiar with ctrl-r, but I still very much like the up-arrow behavior described by that commenter.
- flir 7mo ago
  Looking at it from a "law of least surprise" angle, it's exactly how it should behave. "I typed 'cd di↑' and you're giving me 'pwd'??"
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  What I love about the default Bash Crtl-C behaviour is that once a command has been located, the bash history is moved to the history of that command, until Enter is pressed. $ a bash: a: command not found $ b bash: b: command not found $ c bash: c: command not found $ d bash: d: command not found $ <CTRL-R> b <UP> $ a That's great if I don't remember which command I was experimenting with, but I do know other commands that I did around that time (usually a file that I edited with VIM).
BeetleB 7mo ago
There is a difference, I believe. Doesn't Ctrl+r do a substring search instead?
- imglorp 7mo ago
  Yes it's different: it will match anywhere in the previous command lines.
noisy_boy 7mo ago
export EDITOR=vi and then hitting Esc puts you into vi mode; k, j to move up/down through history or pressing / to search etc including using regex is all available.
soraminazuki 7mo ago
Prefix search is faster for the majority of cases. CTRL-r / FZF is useful for the remaining ones.
twelvedogs 7mo ago
If you use multiple terminals it kinda sucks unless you do export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' in your.bashrc or something cause only the last closed terminal saves to history
Zetaphor 7mo ago
Atuin[1] feels like the best of both worlds to me. [1] https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin
- annie511266728 7mo ago
  Atuin looks pretty nice — I might give it a try. I went down the “fully automatic history” path before, but it mostly turned into noise for me. Keeping a tiny cheatsheet of things I had to look up twice ended up working better.
antonvs 7mo ago
Ctrl-r can’t replace prefix search.

n8henrie 7mo ago

Did this many years ago (but with bash) -- life changing is an apt way of saying it.

account42 7mo ago
Here's the Bash commands for this in case anyone is looking for them bind '"\e[A"':history-search-backward bind '"\e[B"':history-search-forward

moebrowne 7mo ago

This can also be achieved with `.inputrc`: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward

az09mugen 7mo ago
Thank you !

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

That's a nice one. One thing I do is configure my keyboard so that "modifier+{ijkl}" mimicks the inverted T arrows key cluster. So there's never a need for me to reach for the arrow keys. And {ijk} makes more sense than vi's {hjkl} and is faster/more logical/less key fingers travel. The nice thing is: as I do this at the keyboard level, this works in every single map. "modifier" in my case is "an easily reachable key in a natural hand position on which my left thumb is always resting" but YMMV. I set that up years ago and it works in every app: it's gorgeous. Heck, I'm using it while editing this very message for example. And of course it composes with SHIFT too: it's basically arrow keys, except at the fingers' natural positions.

aaravchen 7mo ago
I did the same, starting with Ergo Mode in Emacs many years ago, and ending up today with a programmable split keyboard with those keys as arrows on a layer. For when I'm on a laptop without the keyboard, I have a mishmash of solutions that bind to Alt+{ijkl}

BeetleB 7mo ago

Heh. I've done this since forever, but I use PgUp and PgDn so I can retain the original meaning of the up arrow key.

dsp_person 7mo ago
When I was on ubuntu it was easy to uncomment a couple lines in /etc/inputrc for this

hebelehubele 7mo ago

This is the default `fish` shell behavior. Type anything, up/down keys to iterate through full commands that containing the term; alt + up/down to iterate through args containing the term.

naikrovek 7mo ago
Fish is underrated
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

sureglymop 7mo ago

I agree it's a game changer! For bash to do the same I put this in my .inputrc: ## arrow up "\e[A":history-search-backward ## arrow down "\e[B":history-search-forward

niedzielski 7mo ago
+1, i found out about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211344 . total game changer.

Fishkins 7mo ago

I do something similar. I leave up and down arrows alone, but have ctrl+p and ctrl+n behave as you describe.

naikrovek 7mo ago

Atuin is better than anything I’ve used in a shell.

zahlman 7mo ago

I'd try this, but I often find that I want to repeat a cycle of two or more commands. Yes, I probably should edit and put them on one line with semicolons (or even make a function), but.

henrik_w 7mo ago
Or put && between them - I had "compile;run" and when compile failed, it still ran (but the old build). Took me a while to figure out. && ensures the first command succeeds. Anyway, so worth it to combine commands into one line for easy re-run.

dkga 7mo ago

Very nice! Here's the full code for those that had, like me, a more minimalistic .zshrc: ``` autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search autoload -U down-line-or-beginning-search zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[A" up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[OA" up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[B" down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey "^[[OB" down-line-or-beginning-search ```