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Comment by asicsp | Hacker News Reader

>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

View on HN

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".

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!

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.

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