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
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" '
He had in his path a script called `\#` that he used to comment out pipe elements like `mycmd1 | \# mycmd2 | mycmd3`. This was how the script was written:
```
#!/bin/sh
cat
```
Can you explain to me why either of these is useful?
I've somehow gotten by never really needing to pipe any commands in the terminal, probably because I mostly do frontend dev and use the term for starting the server and running prodaccess
I've been a (n)vim user for 20+ years now, but I hate vi-mode in the shell. However if I feel that I need to do a complex command, I just do ctrl-x+e to open up in neovim (with EDITOR=nvim set). I find it a good middle ground.
I WANT to love it - and if I was only ever working on one, or a small number of systems that I was the only one working on I’d probably do it. I’m ALL about customizing my environment.
However ssh into various servers through the day (some of which are totally ephemeral), and having to code switch my brain back and forth between vim mode and emacs mode in the shell would just slow me down and be infuriating each time I connect to a new box.
Doing control+o in insert mode temporarily places you into normal mode so that you can execute one normal-mode command, and then go back to insert mode again--no need to hit 'i' again.
Does it help a lot? You've still got a three to type which is a crime, plus some letters, only to move 3 words. My typing skills are not great, but that sounds like an awful lot of work(?)
If I hit CTRL + ARROW_LEFT 3 times, I am done a lot faster I guess. But I am open to learn, do people really use that and achieve the goal significantly faster?
I don’t love vi-mode, but I’ll address your comment.
Many people these days, including yours truly, have caps-lock mapped to ctrl if held or esc if tapped. That’s good ergonomics and worth considering for any tech-savvy person.
Instead of the 3b I would type bbb (because I agree with you that typing numerals is a pain).
So (caps lock)bbbcw isn’t bad. It’s better than it looks, because if you’re a vim user then it’s just so automatic. “cw” feels like one atomic thing, not two keypresses.
Not a fan of the LLM-flavoured headings, and the tips seem like a real mixed bag (and it'd be nice to give credit specifically to the readline library where appropriate as opposed to the shell), but there are definitely a few things in here I'll have to play around with.
One thing I dislike about brace expansions is that they don't play nicely with tab completion. I'd rather have easy ways to e.g. duplicate the last token (including escaped/quoted spaces), and delete a filename suffix. And, while I'm on that topic, expand variables and `~` immediately (instead of after pressing enter).
CTRL + W usually deletes everything until the previous whitespace, so it would delete the whole '/var/log/nginx/' string in OP's example. Alt + backspace usually deletes until it encounters a non-alphanumeric character.
Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...
In my terminal it's the exact opposite – Alt-Backspace deletes to the previous space, whereas Ctrl-W deletes to the last non-alphanumeric (such as /). I'm using fish shell in an Alacritty terminal.
Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.
> Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.
Fun fact: despite having absolutely no menu entry for it, and I believe not even a command available with Ctrl+Shift+P, Vscode supports Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a closed tab. Discovered out of pure muscle memory.
I've been using a lot of key combinations and I wasn't aware of these two, and I really think these are awesome additions to handling the console. Thank you for showing me. I've only been using it for 22 years, but I haven't come across these :D
`CTRL + U and CTRL + K
CTRL + W`
What I like about these key combinations is that they are kind of universal. A lot of programs on Linux and Mac support all these key combinations out of the box. And that's like a game changer in productivity, especially jumping to the start or the end of the line or jumping forward and backward per word is making working only with the keyboard so much more nice. And in editors together so AVY, you can even get a faster flow of jumping around.
You're typing a long command, then before running it you remember you have to do some stuff first. Instead of Ctrl-C to cancel it, you push it to history in a disabled form.
Prepend the line with # to comment it, run the commented line so it gets added to history, do whatever it is you remembered, then up arrow to retrieve the first command.
In zsh you can bind "push-line-or-edit". In bash and all readline programs, you can approximate it with C-u followed by C-y (i.e. cut and paste). My history is still full of '#' and ':' (csh trauma) prefixed command-lines like you described though ...
Regarding history: I have a function in my ZSH config which excludes certain things from the history. Especially things that can break stuff when my sausage fingers CTRL-R the wrong thing
Something like this:
# Prevent certain strings from appearing in the history
# Anything starting with a leading space is ignored
# Anything containing "--force" or "whatever" is ignored
function zshaddhistory() {
emulate -L zsh
if ! [[ "$1" =~ "(^ |--force|whatever)" ]] ; then
print -sr -- "${1%%$'\n'}"
fc -p
else
return 1
fi
}
With ctrl+r, if you press it twice, it will autofill the search with whatever you last searched for. pressing it more will go back through the history. Been using that a lot recently when doing docker stuff. ctrl+r, type the container name, keep going until I get the compose build command. ctrl+r, ctrl+r, repeat until the log command. Then I can just mash ctrl+r to get the build and log commands. Ctrl+r is your friend. ctrl+r
A much larger base for ksh (as a pdksh descendent) is Android. OpenBSD is a tiny community in comparison, although Android has acquired code directly from OpenBSD, notably the C library.
The vi editing mode is always present in ksh, but is optional in dash. If present, the POSIX standard requires that "set -o vi" enable this mode, although other methods to enable it are not prohibited (such as inputrc for bash/readline), and as such is a "universal trick."
The article is relying on some Emacs mode, which is not POSIX.
$_ is not POSIX if I remember correctly.
History in vi mode is easier, just escape, then forward slash (or question mark) and the search term (regex?), then either "n" or "N" to search the direction or its reverse.
I've seen a lot of people who don't like vi mode, but its presence is the most deeply standardized.
I'd advise against using sudo !! though since it adds the command to history and then it's very easy to accidentally trigger, running some undesired command as root without any prior confirmation. IMO pressing up, Ctrl-A and typing "sudo " isn't much longer but saves you from running unknown commands as root by accident
Decades ago, i used a small dns host. I wanted to switch a personal site and they just couldn't get the final step of the transfer to work. A ton of "try now" emails spanning several weeks.
Then one day, I was trying to setup MySQL on a personal Linux machine, and it wouldn't let me use my "standard password" for the admin account. I knew I could just use a different one, but I really wanted to know what the problem was. Took a long time, and I don't remember how I figured it out, but I eventually tracked it to the password ending with '!!'.
It took a while to put it together, and I never confirmed with the dns host support it's what fixed the issue but, I changed my password there, tried the transfer again, and it worked without any help from support. I suspect my plaintext password played some part in a script used in the transfer process, and was outputting the previous command in place of the !! I wish I had asked them if that was it, but if it was, they would have to admit to having my plain text password, or lie about it.
I didn't know the `ALT + .` trick to repeat the last argument, but what is even more neat (and not mentioned in the article) is that it cycles through your history. At least it does in my shell.
Also known as "emacs editing mode". Funnily enough, what POSIX mandates is the support for "vi editing mode" which, to my knowledge, almost nobody ever uses. But it's there in most shells, and you can enable it with "set -o vi" in e.g. bash.
Vi mode is also available in Claude code and gemini-cli to give some recent examples, and a bunch of other places you might not expect it, as well the more obvious places where code is written.
Once you get used to it, it is painful to go back.
My biggest complaint about the fish shell is the lack of true vi mode. They attempt to emulate it and it works to some degree, but it's no comparison to readline's implementation.
My favourite trick is either commenting out a whole command or placing a comment at the end of a command to make it easier to find in my persistent history (thanks eliben) [0], using the # character.
I tried this in zsh and it wasn't the default behaviour which immediately made me nope from the shell altogether, among all the other quirks. I've just been using bash for far too long to switch to something different.
Something that should be mentioned is starting a command with a space doesn't add it to your history in most shells, really useful for one-off commands that you don't want cluttering your history.
Also, increase your `$HISTSIZE` to more than you think you would need, there have been cases where it helped me find some obscure command I ran like 3 years before.
Another useful "Emergency exit" is CTRL+Z which stops the process and cannot be intercepted.
It's often faster than hitting CTRL+C and waiting for process cleanup, especially when many resources are used. Then you can do e.g. `kill -9 $(jobs -p)` to kill the stopped tasks.
ctrl-z pauses the process, it doesn't terminate. I think of z as in zombie as you can then run fg to bring it back from paused state or as you suggested kill in it for good
I knew many of these tricks, but learned many new tricks I didn't know and looks very useful (like you can do Ctrl-Y after an Ctrl-U, the 'reset' or 'disown' thing).
Regarding experience, I'm also struck by how many "experienced" engineers are just clueless with the keyboard.
I ought to migrate away from shell scripting and just keep the shell for interactive use. Unfortunately I have cursed myself by getting competent-ish with P. shell and Bash scripting. Meaning I end up creating maintenance headaches for my future self.
(Echoes of future self: ... so I asked an LLM to migrate my shell scripts to Rust and)
Anyway with the interactive shell stuff. Yeah the I guess Readline features are great. And beyond that I can use the shortcut to open the current line in an editor and get that last mile of interactivity when I want it. I don’t really think I need more than that?
I tried Vim mode in Bash but there didn’t seem to be a mode indicator anywhere. So dropped that.
Edit: I just tested in my Starship.rs terminal: `set -o vi`. Then I got mode indicators. Just with a little lag.
What I hate is that if you start a command with a space it is not recorded in the history. This happens often when copy+pasting commands. I know you can turn it off but still ... this drives me mad.
I just open, agent in tui, and ask it to do what I want and make a plan, i read the plan edit it and run it.
Simple, no need to learn any commandline these days.
I used to use arch and all, and managed many big projects. I find little value in learning new tools anymore, just feed it docs and it generated working plan most of the time
Now I've moved to coding in Haskell, which i find suits me better than wasting my time with cli and exploring what options all these cli tools have.
I'm confused; how is writing a shell command (using shortcuts like those in the article!) "wasting time", but describing what you want to an LLM, having it make a plan, reading the plan, editing it, and running it is somehow not a waste of time?
You also mention there being "little value", when your proposed approach costs literal money in form of API/token usage (when using hosted models).
What is it like to be this proud of not learning the tools you use? Do you really think several paragraphs to an agent that may or may not be correct is the "easy" way compared to just checking the manual for the flag you want?
In zsh this is configured with
For further life-changing experience... add aliases to .bash_aliases
mycmd1 #| mycmd2
This will output the stdout of mycmd1:
This will output the stdout of mycmd3:I've somehow gotten by never really needing to pipe any commands in the terminal, probably because I mostly do frontend dev and use the term for starting the server and running prodaccess
A mistake 3 words earlier? No problem: <esc>3bcw and I'm good to go.
Want to delete the whole thing? Even easier: <esc>cc
I can even use <esc>v to open the command inside a fully-fledged (neo)vim instance for more complex rework.
If you use (neo)vim already, this is the best way to go as there are no new shortcuts to learn and memorize.
I think the better advice for command-line editing would be to set up the mouse.
I WANT to love it - and if I was only ever working on one, or a small number of systems that I was the only one working on I’d probably do it. I’m ALL about customizing my environment.
However ssh into various servers through the day (some of which are totally ephemeral), and having to code switch my brain back and forth between vim mode and emacs mode in the shell would just slow me down and be infuriating each time I connect to a new box.
Doing control+o in insert mode temporarily places you into normal mode so that you can execute one normal-mode command, and then go back to insert mode again--no need to hit 'i' again.
So, instead of '<esc>cc', '<c-o>S'.
If I hit CTRL + ARROW_LEFT 3 times, I am done a lot faster I guess. But I am open to learn, do people really use that and achieve the goal significantly faster?
Many people these days, including yours truly, have caps-lock mapped to ctrl if held or esc if tapped. That’s good ergonomics and worth considering for any tech-savvy person.
Instead of the 3b I would type bbb (because I agree with you that typing numerals is a pain).
So (caps lock)bbbcw isn’t bad. It’s better than it looks, because if you’re a vim user then it’s just so automatic. “cw” feels like one atomic thing, not two keypresses.
And importantly, it doesn’t involve any chords.
One thing I dislike about brace expansions is that they don't play nicely with tab completion. I'd rather have easy ways to e.g. duplicate the last token (including escaped/quoted spaces), and delete a filename suffix. And, while I'm on that topic, expand variables and `~` immediately (instead of after pressing enter).
As someone who works mostly in WSL and has to use PS occasionally, it really reduces the overhead of the context switch.
Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...
Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.
Fun fact: despite having absolutely no menu entry for it, and I believe not even a command available with Ctrl+Shift+P, Vscode supports Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a closed tab. Discovered out of pure muscle memory.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/726014
This hurts.
Also, for the shell, if you do C+w, you can "paste" it back using C+y. Assuming you have not removed that configuration.
`CTRL + U and CTRL + K CTRL + W`
What I like about these key combinations is that they are kind of universal. A lot of programs on Linux and Mac support all these key combinations out of the box. And that's like a game changer in productivity, especially jumping to the start or the end of the line or jumping forward and backward per word is making working only with the keyboard so much more nice. And in editors together so AVY, you can even get a faster flow of jumping around.
You're typing a long command, then before running it you remember you have to do some stuff first. Instead of Ctrl-C to cancel it, you push it to history in a disabled form.
Prepend the line with # to comment it, run the commented line so it gets added to history, do whatever it is you remembered, then up arrow to retrieve the first command.
$ long_command
<Home, #>
$ #long_command
<Enter>
$ stuff_1 $ stuff_2
<Up arrow a few times>
$ #long_command
<home, del>
$ long_command
Something like this:
And not only cd. Gotta love 'git checkout -'
The vi editing mode is always present in ksh, but is optional in dash. If present, the POSIX standard requires that "set -o vi" enable this mode, although other methods to enable it are not prohibited (such as inputrc for bash/readline), and as such is a "universal trick."
The article is relying on some Emacs mode, which is not POSIX.
$_ is not POSIX if I remember correctly.
History in vi mode is easier, just escape, then forward slash (or question mark) and the search term (regex?), then either "n" or "N" to search the direction or its reverse.
I've seen a lot of people who don't like vi mode, but its presence is the most deeply standardized.
On bash, you can achieve this by setting HISTCONTROL=ignorespace but that's not the default.
Then one day, I was trying to setup MySQL on a personal Linux machine, and it wouldn't let me use my "standard password" for the admin account. I knew I could just use a different one, but I really wanted to know what the problem was. Took a long time, and I don't remember how I figured it out, but I eventually tracked it to the password ending with '!!'.
It took a while to put it together, and I never confirmed with the dns host support it's what fixed the issue but, I changed my password there, tried the transfer again, and it worked without any help from support. I suspect my plaintext password played some part in a script used in the transfer process, and was outputting the previous command in place of the !! I wish I had asked them if that was it, but if it was, they would have to admit to having my plain text password, or lie about it.
Stuff like NVM or Oh My ZSH will add a few seconds to your shell startup time.
https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k
> The Backspace Replacements
Also known as "emacs editing mode". Funnily enough, what POSIX mandates is the support for "vi editing mode" which, to my knowledge, almost nobody ever uses. But it's there in most shells, and you can enable it with "set -o vi" in e.g. bash.
Once you get used to it, it is painful to go back.
I tried this in zsh and it wasn't the default behaviour which immediately made me nope from the shell altogether, among all the other quirks. I've just been using bash for far too long to switch to something different.
[0] https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...
`| sudo tee file` when current user does not have permission to >file
Also, increase your `$HISTSIZE` to more than you think you would need, there have been cases where it helped me find some obscure command I ran like 3 years before.
It's often faster than hitting CTRL+C and waiting for process cleanup, especially when many resources are used. Then you can do e.g. `kill -9 $(jobs -p)` to kill the stopped tasks.
Quite a few useful ones
I've never used the majority of these tricks for decades, except for brace expansion, process substitutions, and complex redirections.
Regarding experience, I'm also struck by how many "experienced" engineers are just clueless with the keyboard.
Close tab.
I ought to migrate away from shell scripting and just keep the shell for interactive use. Unfortunately I have cursed myself by getting competent-ish with P. shell and Bash scripting. Meaning I end up creating maintenance headaches for my future self.
(Echoes of future self: ... so I asked an LLM to migrate my shell scripts to Rust and)
Anyway with the interactive shell stuff. Yeah the I guess Readline features are great. And beyond that I can use the shortcut to open the current line in an editor and get that last mile of interactivity when I want it. I don’t really think I need more than that?
I tried Vim mode in Bash but there didn’t seem to be a mode indicator anywhere. So dropped that.
Edit: I just tested in my Starship.rs terminal: `set -o vi`. Then I got mode indicators. Just with a little lag.
Makes for a definite return of sanity ..
I could kiss you.. this alone is amazing!
If you are feeling brave
Simple, no need to learn any commandline these days.
I used to use arch and all, and managed many big projects. I find little value in learning new tools anymore, just feed it docs and it generated working plan most of the time
Now I've moved to coding in Haskell, which i find suits me better than wasting my time with cli and exploring what options all these cli tools have.
You also mention there being "little value", when your proposed approach costs literal money in form of API/token usage (when using hosted models).
> Now I've moved to coding in Haskell
You might like https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle or http://nellardo.com/lang/haskell/hash/
I will never understand people like you.
They don't matter much to me.