Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)

Once you start using CTRL+r, you may find that you never reach for up arrow again.

I agree it's a game changer! For bash to do the same I put this in my .inputrc:

    ## arrow up
    "\e[A":history-search-backward
    ## arrow down
    "\e[B":history-search-forward

This is the default `fish` shell behavior. Type anything, up/down keys to iterate through full commands that containing the term; alt + up/down to iterate through args containing the term.

This can also be achieved with `.inputrc`:

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

I do something similar. I leave up and down arrows alone, but have ctrl+p and ctrl+n behave as you describe.

Atuin is better than anything I’ve used in a shell.

Did this many years ago (but with bash) -- life changing is an apt way of saying it.

Heh. I've done this since forever, but I use PgUp and PgDn so I can retain the original meaning of the up arrow key.

> life-changing

For further life-changing experience... add aliases to .bash_aliases

    alias gph='history | grep --colour -i '
    alias gpc='grep --colour -Hin '
    #if gnu time is installed
    alias timef='/usr/bin/time -f "tm %E , cpu %P , mem %M" '

That's a nice one.

One thing I do is configure my keyboard so that "modifier+{ijkl}" mimicks the inverted T arrows key cluster. So there's never a need for me to reach for the arrow keys. And {ijk} makes more sense than vi's {hjkl} and is faster/more logical/less key fingers travel. The nice thing is: as I do this at the keyboard level, this works in every single map. "modifier" in my case is "an easily reachable key in a natural hand position on which my left thumb is always resting" but YMMV.

I set that up years ago and it works in every app: it's gorgeous. Heck, I'm using it while editing this very message for example.

And of course it composes with SHIFT too: it's basically arrow keys, except at the fingers' natural positions.

This reminds me of an excerpt from an old Emacs manual:

    . . . if you forget which commands deal with windows, just type @b[ESC-?]@t[window]@b[ESC].

I think the better advice for command-line editing would be to set up the mouse.

I've been a (n)vim user for 20+ years now, but I hate vi-mode in the shell. However if I feel that I need to do a complex command, I just do ctrl-x+e to open up in neovim (with EDITOR=nvim set). I find it a good middle ground.

I use vim a lot but not on the shell

A mistake 3 words earlier?

meta-bbbd (not as elegant, I admit)

delete the whole thing?

ctrl-ak (this is even quicker than vim, especially if capslock is mapped to ctrl)

the control-based emacs movements work system-wide on macos btw. I am using ctrl-p and ctrl-n to go up and down lines, ctrl-a and ctrl-e to go to beginning and end of lines while writing this comment in by browser (which has vimium extension)

Sometimes I wish vim just had full emacs bindings while in insert mode. But I don't like to mess with defaults too much.

I keep thinking I should give vim readline a try though, so maybe today. Thanks for the comment.

I've never understood why emacs mode became the default. "set -o vi" is the _first_ command I type in a new shell.

Oh wow I didn't know about this, thank you. The underlying feature is called "readline vi-mode" for folks who want to search more about it.

> <esc>cc

Doing control+o in insert mode temporarily places you into normal mode so that you can execute one normal-mode command, and then go back to insert mode again--no need to hit 'i' again.

So, instead of '<esc>cc', '<c-o>S'.

I've been a vim/nvim casual user for the past year or two, and I still feel as if I'm slightly less proficient in it for the amount of time that I put into it.

I really need to get around to playing with it more. I just hope that especially now with genAI that it's not too late for learning it further.

   <esc>3bcw

The <esc>v has been such a lifesaver at times when having to execute/modify super complex commands!

A similar trick:

    #!/bin/sh
    $*

Wow I hate* that. I use bracket comments. They're cool cause they are bracket comments, so I use it in scripts to document pipelines. They are annoying cause they are bracket comments, in an interactive shell I have to type more and in TWO places. It's fun to reason-out how it works ;)

  $ echo foo | tr fo FO | sed 's/FOO/BAR/'
  BAR
  $ echo foo | ${IFS# tr fo FO | } sed 's/FOO/BAR/'
  foo

  foo \
  | bar ${IFS Do the bar. Do it. } \
  | baz

Yes! That one's going in my $PATH. Such a useful use of cat!

What does it provide over

mycmd1 #| mycmd2

Firefox v147 finally added the ability to redefine keyboard shortcuts, including ^w: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46952095

1. Load about:keyboard

2. Find "Close tab" and click "Clear" or "Change".

> Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...

You're telling me!!!

(I use vim daily, with multiple splits in a single instance.)

In my terminal it's the exact opposite – Alt-Backspace deletes to the previous space, whereas Ctrl-W deletes to the last non-alphanumeric (such as /). I'm using fish shell in an Alacritty terminal.

Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.

Set $WORDCHARS accordingly. In your case, remove / from $WORDCHARS.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/726014

Depends on the shell - bash on my Ubuntu deletes entire '/var/log/nginx/', while after switching to sh it deletes only nginx

Ctrl-Shift-T usually brings that tab right back at least

> Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...

This hurts.

Also, for the shell, if you do C+w, you can "paste" it back using C+y. Assuming you have not removed that configuration.

I've installed "More Better Ctrl-W" for Chromium, and mapped Ctrl-W to do nothing, and Ctrl-D to close the current tab

'man readline' contains all the useful key combinations.

...which is why I recently went to about:keyboard and removed that hotkey. I love that page.

That, and Ctrl-N. No more forest of blank browser windows when using a terminal emulator in a web page!

(Firefox only)

You missed an easier alternative that was in the article: ctrl-u saves and clears the current line, then you can input new commands, then use ctrl-y to yank the saved command.

With zsh, I prefer to use alt-q which does this automatically (store the current line, display a new prompt, then, after the new command is sent, restore the stored line). It can also stack the paused commands, e.g.:

$ cp foo/bar dest/ <alt-q>

$ wcurl -o foo/bar "$URL" <alt-q>

$ mkdir foo <enter> <enter> <enter>

In zsh you can bind "push-line-or-edit". In bash and all readline programs, you can approximate it with C-u followed by C-y (i.e. cut and paste). My history is still full of '#' and ':' (csh trauma) prefixed command-lines like you described though ...

Fwiw, in Bash, alt-shift-3 will prepend the current command with # and start a new command.

you should look into autojump which has `jc` (jump child), or other similar flavours of "smart cd" (z, fzf, etc)

post-it note until you dont need it anymore

I hate to be the AI guy, but a coach that lived in my terminal and corrected me when I do it the slow way would actually help.

That's very cool!

To take advantage of the "leading space" one, I have this, to mark some commands that I never want to record:

       unhist () {
         alias $1=" $1"
       }
       unhist unhist
       unhist fzf
       unhist rghist     #custom command that greps .zhistory,...

> # f2 is ^[OQ; to double check, run `xargs` and then press f2

I remember using `cat -v` before learning that `xargs` exists… or maybe before `xargs` actually existed on systems I used :)

Not just the heading is LLM-flavoured. So is the writing, e.g. "The shell is a toolbox, not an obstacle course."

Speaking of readline, I recently found out PowerShell has a readline mode (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadli...) and it works great.

As someone who works mostly in WSL and has to use PS occasionally, it really reduces the overhead of the context switch.

Readline is close enough to being part of bash that it’s not really inaccurate to call these all shell features imo.

The '-' shortcut is weird. In 'git commit -F -', the '-' is actually /dev/stdin.

Make sure to add fzf + shell integration for maximum Ctrl+r goodness.

i never found !! useful at all when i can just use up arrow to get the entry i want. it becomes more interesting when you can recall older commands, but then too i prefer search because i want to verify what command i am going to run.

and i only use sudo to open a root shell. never to run anything directly. i don't want normal and root commands mixed in the same history.

i could keep sudo commands out of the history, but then i don't have any history for stuff done as root.

with tmux i can switch terminals easily, so i am also not tempted to run things as root that i shouldn't despite having a root shell open.

I have a bash key binding, Ctrl+Y, that prepends sudo to the current command and submits it. I also don't use sudo-rs. No one has died yet.

Decades ago, i used a small dns host. I wanted to switch a personal site and they just couldn't get the final step of the transfer to work. A ton of "try now" emails spanning several weeks.

Then one day, I was trying to setup MySQL on a personal Linux machine, and it wouldn't let me use my "standard password" for the admin account. I knew I could just use a different one, but I really wanted to know what the problem was. Took a long time, and I don't remember how I figured it out, but I eventually tracked it to the password ending with '!!'.

It took a while to put it together, and I never confirmed with the dns host support it's what fixed the issue but, I changed my password there, tried the transfer again, and it worked without any help from support. I suspect my plaintext password played some part in a script used in the transfer process, and was outputting the previous command in place of the !! I wish I had asked them if that was it, but if it was, they would have to admit to having my plain text password, or lie about it.

Prepend your command with a space and now your command is not saved in the history.

Agreed. I lazy-load NVM to get around that:

  lazy_nvm() {
    unset -f nvm node npm npx
    [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && . "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
  }
  nvm()  { lazy_nvm; nvm "$@"; }
  node() { lazy_nvm; node "$@"; }
  npm()  { lazy_nvm; npm "$@"; }
  npx()  { lazy_nvm; npx "$@"; }

I can recommend powerlevel10k with instant prompt enabled.

https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k

good call

if you care about perf, fnm is better/faster/cleaner than nvm. (also, mise is able to manage "all the things", not just node)

IME omzsh slowness usu relates to overloading it w plugins, which I've never found a need for...

Yes, those are shortcuts used in the GNU readline library, which many programs use whenever they need to read lines of text interactively from their operators. Notable examples are (most) shells, (most) interpreters, and tools like ftp, fzf, etc.

Notably, these keybindings are it's default map, which comes from the GNU's project editor Emacs. But, there is also the POSIX-compliant, but not-default, editing mode based on Bill Joy's visual editor (vi).

It all depends on your perspective.

Are you yanking into your kill ring or yanking out of your kill ring? I had trouble with yanking and killing until I realized the complement to yanking, killing, only makes sense in the into-the-kill-ring" direction, so yanking must be out of the kill ring.

When I use vim, which I don't think has a kill ring but registers, I think I am yanking into a register and then pasting from a register later.

So, just ask yourself this: "are you using a kill ring or register to store your text?" and the answer becomes clear.

That is because the terminology (and the keybindings) come from the Emacs tradition, not vim. Most shells come with “vim mode” as well, but at least in my experience, the dual mode editing paradigm of does not feel like a good fit for the shell.

If you aren't aware already, you can put 'setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps' in one of your startup config files, like .bashrc or somesuch. That flips left CTRL and CAPS LOCK.

Built in functionality that may offer something similar:

https://linuxhandbook.com/cdpath/

That's vaccously true as you said isn't it? I write fish on my shell and then I can save it as a fish script. Worth noting that bash is much more portable and available by default, but if I'm going for portability I go straight to /bin/sh

I'd suggest `pwd -P` to resolve symlinks too. (if you use DIR to call/source neighbouring scripts).

Wait... Most of my shell scripts have zero unused variables: I prefer to comment them if I may need them later on.

Why do you disable SC2034?

I don't think not having unused variables prevent me from doing things in my scripts!?

I understand if it's a preference but SC2034 is basically one of my biggest timesavers: in my case unused variables are typically a bug. Except, maybe, ANSI coloring variables at the top of the script.

Make a better system, and we'll consider using it.

A Terminal + Bash/ZSH is soooo sticky because they are VERY good at what they do once you learn the basics and quirks. And now with LLMs, CLIs are even better because LLMs talk in text and CLIs talk in text.

Microsoft tried with PowerShell to design a better system; it "technically" is better, but not "better enough" to justify the cost of switching (on Linux). The same is true of nushell; it is "better", but not better enough to justify switching for most people.

I believe we're at "peak input method" until someone invents Brain<->Computer interfaces.

or - as an alternative to <esc> + ".":

for the last argument

* <alt> + "."

if you want the -<n>th argument:

* <alt> + "_" # n times :=)

* <alt> + "."

cheers a..z

Vi mode is also available in Claude code and gemini-cli to give some recent examples, and a bunch of other places you might not expect it, as well the more obvious places where code is written.

Once you get used to it, it is painful to go back.

And if you set `set editing-mode vi` in ~/.inputrc (readline configuration) you'll have it in even more places.

HISTCONTROL=erasedups can also help keeping more obscure commands in your history, at the expense of context around commands.

it did not work for me in putty, so i added ctrl-x + ctrl-u too:

  bind '"\C-x\C-u": undo'
  bind '"\C-_": undo'

For the most simple case of a single job, I use the job number (`[1]` in the example) with %-notation for the background jobs in kill (which is typically a shell builtin):

    $ cat
    ^Z[1] + Stopped                    cat
    $ kill %1

All of the keyboard-driven terminal signals can be intercepted; catching INT (^C) for cleanup is just more common than the others. Only KILL and STOP cannot be caught.

^Z sends TSTP (not STOP, though they have the same default behavior) to suspend; some programs catch this to do terminal state cleanup before re-raising it to accept the suspension. Catching it to do full backout doesn't make as much sense because the program anticipates being resumed.

^\ sends QUIT, which normally causes a core dump and is rarely caught. If you have core dumps disabled (via ulimit -c 0 or other system configuration) then you can often use it as a harder version of ^C; this is how I would tend to get out of ‘sl’ in places where I found it unwantedly installed.

ctrl-z pauses the process, it doesn't terminate. I think of z as in zombie as you can then run fg to bring it back from paused state or as you suggested kill in it for good

I knew many of these tricks, but learned many new tricks I didn't know and looks very useful (like you can do Ctrl-Y after an Ctrl-U, the 'reset' or 'disown' thing).

Regarding experience, I'm also struck by how many "experienced" engineers are just clueless with the keyboard.

I think the keybinding suggestions are really nice. My shell is configured by default such that Alt+Left and Alt+Right move by a word, but having things that work out of the box, basically always, is really useful whenever I need to do things inside a docker container

I once saw this pattern referred to as a bashtag, which I think was an excellent name (no matter if you actually run bash as your shell or not).

I don’t keep history. Any commands I think will be useful, I save it in a script.

omg >$ CTRL-R<specialthing>

I could kiss you.. this alone is amazing!

You can use `set vi-ins-mode-string` and `set vi-cmd-mode-string` in .inputrc to get indicators in readline, and you can add them to your prompt with a bit more work: https://superuser.com/questions/1466222/move-vi-mode-string-...

AFAIK that setting is opt-in, at least in Bash.

I'm confused; how is writing a shell command (using shortcuts like those in the article!) "wasting time", but describing what you want to an LLM, having it make a plan, reading the plan, editing it, and running it is somehow not a waste of time?

You also mention there being "little value", when your proposed approach costs literal money in form of API/token usage (when using hosted models).

> Now I've moved to coding in Haskell

You might like https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle or http://nellardo.com/lang/haskell/hash/

What is it like to be this proud of not learning the tools you use? Do you really think several paragraphs to an agent that may or may not be correct is the "easy" way compared to just checking the manual for the flag you want?

I will never understand people like you.