The Missing Readline Primer

No mention of .inputrc? An explanation of the kill ring would be nice.

Readline is great but I've been running into something that's driven me nuts for a few weeks now. I recently switched to editing-mode=vi and it seems to have changed the behavior of unix-word-rubout(normally ctrl-w). In emacs mode, unix-word-rubout seems to append to the kill ring. In vi mode, it only replaces it. So in emacs mode, I can eat several words with 'ctrl-w' and paste them with 'ctrl-y'. In vi mode(after setting up the mappings), 'ctrl-y' only pastes the last rubbed-out word.

For those who want a wonderful update to the C-r reverse search, I highly recommend FZF[1], which allows fuzzy search of your command line history when the keybindings are enabled (among other cool features).

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Reminder, if you're working on a project that you don't want to be "infected" by the GPL, take a look at anitrez' Linenoise project: https://github.com/antirez/linenoise It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as Readline, but chances are, you won't miss them anyway.

If I press Ctrl-R, start typing, and get to something like the following, how do I keep what I've typed?

(failed reverse-i-search)`ssh some-host-i-want': ssh some-host-i-dont-want

I can't figure this out!

Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E are discussed. Try also Ctrl-K to delete to the end of the line. Alt-B and Alt-F to move one word at a time. I'm sure there are many more.

Very useful indeed.