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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

This is great. Frankly ctrl-r is almost useless. I've never had it find the command I want, because if I can remember enough of the command to find it, I can just write the whole line myself. And if it was a black magic command I'll wind up digging through log files because I won't be able to remember enough of it to find it.

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I usually just do `history | grep ...` instead; it's faster and more flexible than trying to flip through Ctrl+R matches.

That said, I did just install the history-search-backward and history-search-forward hooks in inputrc, and I can already tell I'll love these.

I do the same, except instead of `history` i grep the .bash_history file :-P

(i almost always need it for stuff i typed several sessions ago)

Just tag commands with a # at the end

> $ complex command here # tagHere

Later use the tag with ctrl+r

I do this all the time

Brilliant! Thanks!!!

See other post, there's a solution for most of your history search problems and it's called fzf.

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

https://github.com/kelleyma49/PSFzf

check out https://github.com/dvorka/hstr which you can bind to CTRL+R.

tagging with # comment is also a nice trick

ctrl-r works great if you have a standard command with a long file path you can't remember.

Just an anecdote though.

It works best for me in the opposite situation: an easy-to-remember path or subcommand, as part of a long line (usually involving if or while, and a series of commands)

I constantly use ctrl-r to reuse my most recent cd/ssh/git commit message/etc.

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