If you enjoy that, then let me introduce you you fzf - a fuzzy finder that has support for replacing ctrl + r in shells with fuzzy matching. Among other uses.
It's the same, ctrl + r. It is a bash/shell thing so works on any os that uses bash or similar shells. Note, it is not the command key, but ctrl, unlike a lot of other shortcuts on macos.
For real. Alternatively use alias to reassign a command to something shorter if it's one you're always searching for later. I use 'update' as an alias for 'apt update && apt upgrade -y && apt autoremove && apt autoclean'
Y'all know about ctrl-r to search history, right? I went for so many years without even thinking to look for something better than up-arrow, so I have to mention it.
Good tip!I didn't know about that. I just tried it out and it works pretty well but I worry how long it will take to break the habit of mashing the up arrow all the time since I've been doing it so long. This is clearly better though.
Hey! Sorry just getting into Linux, I love learning about cool ways of doing things more efficiently. What does this do exactly? I've noticed others mentioning CTRL+R and I am not sure what that means either. Thank you!
Basically, while ctrl+r is nice, this is how I got used to use my system. What this does is enable search for when you press arrow up. If you type nothing then it’s default behavior but if you type “ssh” and then start pressing arrow up it will bring up the previous command that had the word ssh in. It’s worth it for someone who constantly forgets ctrl+r exists
I feel this in my soul. Or when you realize you're hitting up up up up to find something trivial like ls and it would have been more efficient to just type ls. LOL.
yeah, the other day i was supposed to remove a restriction from a router that was some custom thing built on a raspberry pi. i logged in, started messing around, trying to figure out the system, and of course i looked at bash_history because why not, i'm unfamiliar with the setup so it seemed like a good place to start. up until i found some commands editing it. so i'm like
$ export HISTFILE=/dev/null # alright, two can play this game
it ended up being a simply cron job that runs a script that starts and stops hostapd every once in a while. i didn't disable the cron job, i just commented out a critical line from the stop script. happy debugging to the sysadmin, lol
Friendly Interactive SHell. I also use it, and I find some of the extra features delightful. I don't think it's POSIX compliant if you're one of the two dozen people who have to worry about that for your use case.
You know how we have the bash shell by default on most Linux systems? Well there's also the fish shell you can probably find it in your repo and try it out.
Fish Shell - Friendly Interactive Shell. It has tons of themes and customizable prompts, but most importantly it scans through your command history and autocompletes previous commands. You can even to back through previous versions of a certain command for example I copy a couple different files a lot so I'll type 'cd' then press up to get to the specific command I need. It'll also autocomplete command names if they're in the path. It's a life changer for sure
As some one who SSH's from a phone to run Docker containers and will be moving the container volumes to a different location, I thank you for this lovely command.
I'm more of a tcsh user, where by default alt+p will search backwards for a command that starts with the text currently written in the prompt. So, type "vim" followed by alt+p as many times as necessary until I find the exact vim call that I'm looking for (normally followed by an alt+n because I pressed one too many times on p). In bash by default you have ctrl+r followed by the string you're looking for and press ctrl+r until you find the command. I can see online that alt+p is bound by default to non-incremental-reverse-search-history, where I think history-search-backward would be a better match to tcsh's behavior. Currently not at the computer so I can't test it.
I’ve been using unix for about 20 years (Oracle DBA) and am embarrassed about how few shortcuts I know.
I vaguely remember seeing someone use tab to auto fill a command but never remember to find out how.