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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

I have a love-hate relationship with Readline. While it is good once learnt, it's really hard to learn.

For beginners it's not obvious there is anything to learn, and even if they do want to know, you have to basically be told to Google for 'Readline'. It would be great if it could somehow be made more discoverable.

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Back when it was written Emacs was pretty popular (well, it had been the default around the lab for about a decade). So users would use it without noticing. The same reason the standard text widgets of Mac OS support Emacs commands.

Open firmware had emacs key bindings too, like the song says:

http://osxwiki.net/media/ofwsong-lyrics.txt

I recall my joy when I realized that the Netscape browser supported Emacs shortcuts when working in a textarea.

We need a program that logs sessions and tells us where we could have saved keystrokes.

I think something like the script command to record my session along with a list of rules to look for, so when I backspace 8 times to delete a word it suggests C-w. Or when I arrow to the end of line it suggests C-e.

I've been thinking about this for the past six months. If anyone has suggestions, let me know.

You need to run deep q learning on your bash history

agree. it's pretty well referenced in most shell documentation (checked bash and pdksh).. but then, well, you have to be someone who reads shell documentation..

of course, if you're not someone who reads shell documentation, then, well, how would you find a better reference anyway..

For starters, how about:

  $ man readline

Man pages are sometimes cryptic. When someone is first learning something, having all the details thrown in their face can be quite off-putting, at least for me

info readline instead perhaps

That can't really be "for starters", because it requires one to already know of readline in order to pull up the manpage.

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