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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

I'm using bash (and thus GNU readline) all day every day at work, and by far the most useful shortcut for me is Ctrl-r (reverse history search).

I also sometimes use Ctrl-a (start of line, if the keyboard doesn't have a convenient Home key) and Ctrl-e (end of line, in lieu of End key).

Btw the post disses Ctrl-s / Ctrl-q for pausing/resuming terminal output, but it can be useful when you're outputting a lot of text (for example tailing a logfile).

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>by far the most useful shortcut for me is Ctrl-r

I rarely ever use Ctrl-r since I usually know the starting part of the command I want. So, I type those starting characters and use up/down arrow keys, courtesy these lines in `~/.inputrc`

    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    "\e[B": history-search-forward

That's useful, but C-r has its merits too, as you can search for any string in the history. So, even if you run, say, python programs all day, here's a way to find that one time you used a different command line parameter... etc.

You can set bindings for substring search too:

    "\e[A":history-substring-search-backward
    "\e[B":history-substring-search-forward

Cool!

a really cool hack I found in an HN thread long ago was to stick "hashtags" (aka bash end-of-line comments) at the ends of commands you want to find in your history quickly:

  sudo systemctl restart myservice #bounce

and then ctrl-r and type your hashtag to get right to it

That’s a good one.

This is now the HN thread in which I found this really cool hack. Thank you.

I'm officially naming these "bashtags".

I don't want to discount how valuable this may be to you. However, for the average sysadmin, or developer who spends time in shells on many different machines, I would gently suggest that this is not a good idea. It's not a significant enough improvement over the way it works out-of-the-box to merit both (1) not getting used to Ctrl-r and (2) getting used to a different behavior for the arrow keys. Just my opinion, of course.

If you're the sysadmin, then chances are high you can add this to the base image of all the systems you regularly touch.

Many of my commands start identically but continue and end differently. Here C-r (or ^R if you prefer) is the most convenient.

Sending a looong command to your editor for modification via C-x C-e is also convenient sometimes.

>Many of my commands start identically but continue and end differently. Here C-r (or ^R if you prefer) is the most convenient.

Not sure if I understood this correctly. You can use up/down arrow multiple times, just like Ctrl-r/s - so it is a huge improvement for me.

If you don't already know about it: combining fzf with Ctrl-r is _amazingly good_ https://github.com/junegunn/fzf it's a fuzzy finder combined with reverse history search..

> but it can be useful when you're outputting a lot of text (for example tailing a logfile).

Use "tail +F" and press ^C when you need to pause at some line. Press F to resume tailing.

WAT

I always use -f then cancel out when I think I see what I want, I really need to read man pages for things I use

less(1) provides similar follow/stop-following functionality.

I think I was thinking of less, haha.

Ctrl-r history search is made 1000x better with fzf fuzzy history search. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

I agree with you. What I have also done is increase the history size:

https://eshlox.net/2017/08/01/bash-increase-command-history-...

A hacked up version of ci"/ca" is my favourite thing, something like this;

set keymap vi-command

"ci\"": "T\"ct\""

I don't think you can do bracket matching/counting, but, even so, ci( is also pretty handy.

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