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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Readline —- I’m sometimes amazed at the number of relatively seasoned developers who don’t know simple commands like ctrl-r. This one really pays off because almost all shells and repls like ipython or the mysql client implement it.

Sample cheat sheet:

https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html

You don’t have to learn it all, but mastering the basics like moving to the end/beginning on the line, moving/deleting by word, yank, history search and the like will pay off handsomely.

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If you're a vi user, edit ~/.inputrc and add:

   set editing-mode vi
   set keymap vi-command

This changes readline behavior from emacs to vi. This, along with "set -o vi" in bash, are really handy (though can be frustrating for others if you ever share a keyboard pair programming).

In Zsh, it will set the editing mode to whatever your $EDITOR is set to. So if $EDITOR == vim, readline will be set to vim mode.

I’m a vim person, but I feel like the modal workflow does not work well at all in a shell.

Nice! I’ve been at this game for a while and ctrl-r must have slipped right past me till now. I’ve regularly do ‘history | grep ___’ but ctrl-r looks like a far better solution.

I'll just mention fzf then.

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Huge fan as well. What I really want is a terminal which has Vim's "normal mode" keybindings for scrolling back the buffer, selecting, find/replace... but then anytime you go to "insert mode", you get Readline. Best of both worlds.

I think that's Neovim's terminal mode. I personally don't use it because I use a tiling window manager, so it's easy to launch another terminal wherever I want and I'm happy with the key bindings. But some people swear by terminal mode.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out.

Lots of the commands work in many macOS GUI apps as well.

The origin of those shared commands isn't from readline, but rather from emacs key bindings that made it into both readline and MacOS: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

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