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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've never been able to get iTerm to do that every other iTerm user seems to have setup almost automatically is how it ghosts the full completion of a command you are typing (faded behind your live typing), presumably from your history, and then you can just tab to complete the whole thing. So many commands are repeated often and I've never been able to get mine to do this very basic feature.

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You are probably referring to fish shell which has this feature (https://fishshell.com/).

However, I find that zsh + ohmyzsh works just as well. After typing the beginning of a command you can use the arrow keys to cycle through all commands in the history with the same beginning.

A third method for efficient history search is ctrl+r. Just press ctr+r and start typing part of the command. Then you press enter to execute or ctr+r to cycle through the history.

ctr+r is a great tip!

It's worth getting used to your new discovery a bit first (C-r is isearch-backward), partly because it's useful in other places, too – for example ipython or any decent programming language shell has emacs-derived keybindings including isearch via readline or a clone.

But after that, I'd suggest giving fzf (https://github.com/junegunn/fzf) a try.

fish is nice but I've ran into too many issues where some weird shell command / script I find online is expecting to be in bash and I have to switch out of fish, so its hard for me to switch.

You can usually drop to a bash subshell for those

As long as they don't need to be sourced, you can just add a shebang for bash at the top of the scripts and run them via bash.

If they do need to be sourced, you can use bass: https://github.com/edc/bass

Wow this is neat — I’m gonna try this out. Does it really work?

It works at least for nvm (caveat: Installed from nvm directly, not homebrew), and my company's ssh setup script, which are the two reasons I've had cause to use it.

Just run it with bash then. The syntax is too different to run bash script on fish.

Fish 3 will fix a lot of that. Try the nightly builds.

oh-my-zsh is effectively unmaintained. That is not the worst thing in the world, but one may wish to consider prezto as an alternative:

https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

Or zplug which allows you to load oh-my-zsh scripts as well.

I see like 6 commits to oh-my-zsh in the past week. Why do you say its not maintained?

688 open pull requests, the existence of a half-dozen competing projects, and Robby's blog post suggesting that he doesn't take the project seriously.

Using integrated fzf is so much better than cycling through one by one.

Zsh also has history completion of words.

M-/ (opt/alt + /)

You're talking about autosuggestion, one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE features. I tell everyone about this:

If you're nervous about running shell commands here they're the same as the installation on the site if you care to check:

    sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
    git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

Then edit your ~/.zshrc plugins

    # Plugins
    plugins=(zsh-autosuggestions)

Then restart and type some commands. re-type a command you did and push control+e to complete it. I recommend re-binding your caps lock key to control for vim and also tons of hotkey ease of use. then you can just use caps+e for instant fast typing.

Combine this with using control+p to cycle through previous commands means you can be a wizard at commands quickly

I thought that was a zsh thing rather than an iTerm2 thing. You can use zsh in iTerm2 though.

Hm, that must mean everyone I know is using zsh and I didn't realize that... that strongly suggests I should use it too!

Zsh and fish are, imo, much better environments than bash. And bash, once tamed, due to its ubiquity, is a better choice for scripting.

not my choice. certainly less people suffer bash in the BSD world.

while bashims may give additional features, readability and portability suffers. I much prefer scripts using a posixish #!/bin/sh and a strict subset of shell syntax. something like pdfx.

That's why I emphasized "choice", using sh for scripting is a valid choice.

People should realize terminal and scripting don't need to be done using same shell.

I use fish for scripting but run zsh for terminal. (fish had couple weirdness in day to day terminal use and zsh could do pretty much all fish could do with zplug.)

Specifically, most people use oh-my-zsh, which is a preconfigured set of zsh plugins and various other settings[1] with the autosuggestions[2] plugin.

1 - https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

2 - https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

oh-my-zsh has more than six hundred open pull requests, and can be considered unmaintained. It is perfectly usable in most respects, and I would not expect that to change in the near future. However, some competing projects have started because of that, and may be worth consideration.

https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto https://github.com/zsh-users/antigen See also: https://github.com/unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins

You can do this in Zsh: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

You can get that if you are using fish shell. For zsh, there is an auto suggestion package that you have to install.

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