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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

Given the title of the article, I was really hoping that the author would answer the following question. Suppose I have the following line:

>rsync ~/20160604/apache-tomcat-7.0.63/webapps/ROOT/contact.html apache-tomcat-1:/svr/apache-tomcat-7.0.63/webapps/ROOT/

I'm rsyncing the contact.html file to my website. Now I want to rsync the index.html page. I do this by:

1. Pressing the up arrow key to get the previous command.

2. Press and hold the back arrow key until it gets to "contact.html"

3. Press and hold backspace to delete "contact.html" and type "index.html"

My question is: How to quickly move the cursor to a location on the line. For example, in Vi I could do "F+c" twice to move to the first "c" if this were a text file. I know I can enabled Vi commands for Bash, but this seems cumbersome. There has to be a way in Bash to jump around the already typed line.

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Yet another option:

Typing "Ctrl-r aString" will recall the previous command and position the cursor where the string "aString" occurs. You can then Alt-d, Ctrl-w, whatever.

cf http://stackoverflow.com/a/2215511

Oh hey, this is definitely the closest / fastest to what I want. Although if I cut and paste a line from another window, I still need a way to jump to some position in that line.

Last resort is Ctrl-x Ctrl-e :)

Maybe you are asking a different question than this, but this should work:

> $ mroe file1 ; mroe file2

> $ !!:gs/mroe/more

But instead, you would do:

>$ rsync ~/20160604/apache-tomcat-7.0.63/webapp /ROOT/contact.html apache-tomcat-1:/svr/apache-tomcat-7.0.63/webapps/ROOT/

> $ !!:gs/contact/index

I've added word hopping ctrl-left / right keybindings to my ~/.inputrc (you can also put it in your .bashrc but .inputrc works for all readline programs including bash):

    "\e[1;5C":forward-word
    "\e[1;5D":backward-word

The readline manual shows more sophisticated argument operations. Zsh, IIRC, has more features for command processing.

My habit is: Ctrl-x Ctrl-e after your step 1. (Note: be sure to have your $EDITOR set)

Otherwise, typing ^contact^index after your step 1 should also work.

It's not as precise as vi movement, but for most command line activities I find the Emacs-like movements sufficiently practical:

M-b: back one word

M-f: forward one word

C-a: beginning of line

C-e: end of line

I also don't like to use the arrow keys because they are so far away, so:

C-b: back one character

C-f: forward one character

C-p: previous command

C-n: next command

And since I'm making a list now anyway:

C-k: Kill to end of line.

C-u: Kill to beginning of line.

C-y: Yank (put/paste) last killed string. You can then cycle further through the kill ring with M-y.

But I have a question concerning Emacs movement: M-b and M-f are rather similar to vim's b and e, respectively, meaning they don't jump to the beginning/end of the non-whitespace-string. That's why vim has B and E. Is there anything similar in Emacs?

If you do man-bash, and look for the READLINE header, you can see all of the navigation and history manipulation functions available to you. Of particular interest would be forward-word, backward-word, and edit-and-execute-command.

The equivalent in Emacs mode (the bash default) is Ctrl+].

Alt+<number> followed by that goes to that <number> occurrence of the character, so "Alt+4 Ctrl+] c" would go to the 4th c. Ctrl+Alt+] searches backwards in the same way.

But I find just about anything better.

!!:s/contact/index/ ^contact^index alias r='fc -e - --' # if not already present r contact=index

or if you know ahead of time, do them both together

rsync ~/20160604/apache-tomcat-7.0.63/webapps/ROOT/{contact,index}.html

^contact^index

Since you know how to do this in vi, do a Ctrl+x Ctrl+e to open the command in $EDITOR. Closing the editor will execute whatever was edited in it.

There's also a shell builtin `fc` (mnemonic: fix command) that does this.

He talks about using ^ substitution in the article. You could do: ^contact^index

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