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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if having the search use context like cwd is a win in practice or not. I’ll have to try this out to see.

I’ve been using `history | grep` since forever (usually `history | grep foo | tail -n 5` which has been a single-character alias for more than 30 years). Hard to beat. Since history gives you the line number you can just `!12345` — no need to copy/paste, and works through an ssh connection!

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It definitely is (IME, and YMMV of course). Fish shell and the similar zsh-autosuggestion plugin work with directory context, and it almost always suggests the intended autocompletion (not sure why this McFly thingie needs a neural network for this when a per-directory most-recently-used pattern matcher already works perfectly).

I’m surprised that it is useful because I often want to use the same commands in different directories!

But just to be clear: I didn’t at all write “surprised” as some polite euphemism for “this is dumb”. Clearly people have found it useful for a while and it’s harmless easy for me to collect some empirical data, so I just installed it. Might turn out to be a big win.

In Fish you can still do that. The cwd is a hint to the candidate sorting algorithm, but not a strict requirement.

If anything is going to beat fish, it's probably something with a neural network. I wonder if it is actually better.

I just fzf through history, works like a charm

This is by far my favorite fzf feature, I barely use all the other (awesome) things it can do, but I probably use the history thing 100 times a day. It's funny because it's replaced some of what I used to do with aliases and shell config - why remember a command when I can just fzf and pull it up effortlessly ;)

I find it very useful. I made a tool similar to mcfly (before knowing it existed) and use this workflow (`--here`) constantly. Also hostname context and shell session can be useful at times, too, to reconstruct something in the past.

https://github.com/chipturner/pxhist

> I’ve been using `history | grep` since forever... which has been a single-character alias for more than 30 years...

I have "history | grep" basically aliased to "h?"

Ok? Sounds like the person you're replying to said they did too? Why are we ending our statements in question marks.

My understanding is that the question mark is part of the alias name.

Oh that makes sense. I never am completely sure how to deal with the interaction of quote marks at the intersection of code and English

Yup: that's why I put in quotes... I'm literally using "h?" as a Bash alias, as GP said.

It may be a bit weird to use a question mark as part of a Bash alias that said: sorry for the confusion!

For what it's worth, I like to use backticks in these situations (e.g. `h?`). I think it reduces ambiguity a bit.

I do this too although it can add ambiguity when writing about the shell!

Why are we ending our questions with full stops!

Great question?

Because we sheeple kowtow to the periodarchy..

I’ve decided to end sentances with two to try to avoid their ire..

Just curious, how do you grep for foo in the middle of an alias like that? I usually use a function for something like this, or are you using alias colloquially?

Probably a bash function rather than an alias.

Yeah, lazy imprecision on my part. A function in my .bashrc .

    $ cat ~/bin/f
    #!/bin/bash
    if [ "$1" != "" ] ; then
      find . -type f | grep -v '\.git' | grep -i "$1"
    else
      find . -type f | grep -v '\.git'
    fi

Piping `find` through `grep` like that is inefficient, find has robust filtering capabilities you can use without the overhead of spawning subshells with pipes and calling another binary like grep.

    find . -type f -not -path '*/.git/*' -name "*$1*"

Hrm... `f foo` vs. `.............................................foo..`

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