Better Shell History Search

I spend an awful lot of my day in Unix terminals running shell commands. For some reason, the variance in efficiency between different people when using the shell is huge: I know people who can run rings around me, and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the previous command. I chose that last example very deliberately: most of the commands most of us run in the shell are highly repetitive. I typically run around 50-100 unique (i.e. syntactically distinct) shell commands per working day — but I’ll often run a tiny subset of those commands (e.g. cargo test ) hundreds of time in a single day. Since many command-line tools have hard-to-remember options, we can save huge chunks of time – not to mention make fewer errors – if we can search our shell history to find a previous incantation of a command we want to run. In this post I’m going to show how, with little effort, searching shell history can look like this: [Video] Larger Unix ... Read full article.