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Comment by thom_nic | Hacker News Reader

I found these two references a long time ago, great intro to readline and how to setup an effective .inputrc: http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/octave/octav... and http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/

Since then, .inputrc has been an indispensable part of my dotfiles! This one alone saves so much headache:

    # Incremental search with Up and Down: add to ~/.inputrc
    "\e[A": history-search-backward

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Made a reddit thread to find .inputrc hacks or nice ideas. No success. I like having custom keybindings in the shell. But ultimately I will miss emacs when doing so.

Isn't this ctrl-r by default? With ctrl-shift-r to search forward?

no, by default ctrl-r searches through your history based on subsequent keystrokes. although if you're good with it, it's just as fast as up/down arrows.

I think it's different. With these ones you can start typing a cmd, say 'dd ' and then hit up and it will got through all of the previous commands that started with 'dd '.

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

I'm on a mac using iTerm so I also have:

    "\ed": backward-kill-word

and have added a shortcut to iTerm to send escape-d when I hit alt-delete. It's like a softer version of ctrl-w, which I've found indispensable since I started using it. It's actually more consistent with the standard Mac alt-delete

C-r is reverse-search-history. You press C-r and start typing your search pattern to trigger an incremental search. Most recent command matching the pattern anywhere in the command is selected.

In contrast, history-search-backword requires you to start typing your pattern followed by the keystroke it was bound to. The most recent command that starts with your search pattern is selected.

Those are great resources, thank you!

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