• merc@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      4 days ago

      The worst is when you remember doing something before, but don’t remember enough details to be able to effectively search for it.

      Although, even then, I’m not going to just mindlessly hit “up”. Last time it happened I fed my command history through grep and removed all the things that I knew the command wasn’t. Just removing “ls” and “cd” from your history cuts the number of commands down by 80% or something.

      • ch00f@lemmy.world
        13·
        5 days ago

        Shit is usually a pain in the ass. The challenge is divining how much of a pain in the ass something has to be that someone else might have made a solution for it.

        I didn’t know you could ctrl+shift+c to copy in the terminal until a month ago when my linux n00b wife said "there has to be a better way to do this. I’ve been right clicking to copy for 10 years.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
        4·
        4 days ago

        Just checking, because I learnt to type before I worked this out, and because surely someone reading doesn’t know: press tab. Bash will fill in file names from your current directory.

        E.g. say you have files fred1file, fred2file, jim.

        Type f then press tab, it will fill to “fred”. Then press 2 and press tab again and it will fill the full “fred2file”.

        Have a play, it works in heaps of situations.

        • bobo@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 days ago

          Bash will also do autocomplete for cli programs that have autocomplete functionality. Try typing:

          git r<tab><tab>

          you’ll see options for all the git commands that start with r. Often cli commands will have autocompletion for long (double dash) options.

          If you want to see all the commands that have auto complete available, look in:

          /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/

          There’s a few other locations they can live, notably:

          /etc/bash_completion.d/ ~/.bash_completion ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/

          I don’t know if there are more or if there is any variation per distro.

          You can also write your own bash completions. They can get pretty smart and context sensitive.

          Pretty good beginning tutorial:

          https://iridakos.com/programming/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial

          edit - I should’ve mentioned that this isn’t native to bash, it requires installation of bash-completion. But bash-completion is installed by default in many distros.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
        4·
        5 days ago

        Congratulations! I remember where I was when I first learned it (in a noisy server room at the back of a machine shop).

        Now pair it with FZF for fuzzy finding – it’s surprisingly easy to set up, just following any guide. It’s insanely useful. I find myself even doing things like typing:

        $ xinput --disable $(xinput --list | grep -i touchpad | grep 'id=[0-9]\+' -o | cut -d= -f2)  # Disable synaptic touchpad trackpad pointer

        commands with these like comments on the ends as sort of “tags” so I can ctrl+r search for them later. Yes, I know I could just use a named function, but this is like the step just before that–before I know if I’ll be issuing the same command all the time, or just for the next couple weeks. (This one was from when I was resting my notebook on my laptop.)

        • oddlyqueer@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          I like this; I have a lot of commands that I don’t use often enough to justify an alias, but still need to rerun all the time. thanks!

      • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        As usual, that’s documented (we can RTFM).

        Before trying ctrl-s, you may want to disable software flow control: run stty -ixon & add it to your initialization files. Otherwise, you’ll pause terminal output. ctrl-q resumes terminal output.

        stty reveals terminal special characters

        $ stty -a
⁝
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>; eol2 = <undef>; swtch = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; discard = ^O; …
⁝

        These special characters/keys often perform special functions. To illustrate

        • ctrl-d on empty input typically exits/logs out of interactive terminal applications (including shells)
        • ctrl-u discards input (useful for inputs like password prompts that don’t echo input back)
        • ctrl-v inputs next character literally (such as tab)
    • Damage@feddit.it
      2·
      5 days ago

      Even quicker with zsh or atuin: write the first few letters then arrow up to cycle through all matches

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Even quicker with fish: Write the first few letters then it auto-suggests the last-run command matching that prefix (and then you can still arrow up to cycle through all matches).

        (There is also a zsh plugin for that, called zsh-autosuggestions.)

        • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          A lot of stuff assumes Bash, so occasionally when the syntax differs its slightly annoying; sometimes you have to modify a few lines of a file or something (or run it as in Bash manually). Fish is so nice though. It really should replace Bash for almost everyone. If you really need Bash you can still use it.

          • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
            5·
            4 days ago

            With script files, you can (and should regardless of Fish usage) put a shebang at the top, like #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash. Then it will run with Bash as you’d expect.

            I also recommend not setting Fish as your system-wide default shell (since then a missing shebang will cause it to run in Fish), but rather just have your terminal emulator start fish by default.

            And yeah, outside of scripting, if I notice a command requires Bash syntax (which you can often tell from Fish’s syntax highlighting turning red), then I just run bash, execute the Bash command in there and then exit back out of there.

            Having said all that, I’m not trying to take away from your point. If I wasn’t just joking around, I would caveat a Fish recommendation just as much.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              4 days ago

              Yeah, it’s just some scripts that come with programs sometimes not including that is the issue. Like I said, it isn’t a big issue, just occasionally requires small edits if you try to run the script in Fish, or, like you said, running them with Bash.

    • Mikelius@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 days ago

      I’m shocked how far I had to scroll down before it was mentioned, I was getting scared I would have to say it lol

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 days ago

      I like to imagine someone added it in for their own personal use and told nobody because surely they are the only one.

    • Cenzorrll@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 days ago

      I’m not going to say how long I used linux before learning this. It isn’t “this many days old”, but it may as well be.

      I have 7 headless linux boxes running.

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
    39·
    5 days ago

    I used to be like this but people seriously. CTRL+R

    Do it. Don’t make this one of those things you’ve heard about and just never got around to trying. Open your terminal right now and CTRL+R and type any part of the command you did before. If the command you want is not showing first just hit CTRL+R again to go to the next one back.

    DO IT.

    Edit: I did learn from this thread today though that ZSH has it set to where you can just type part of what you’re looking for then hit up to do the same thing. Neat!

  • JATth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    zsh-history-substring-search

    I lazily type part of the thing I want like “sys” and then ctrl+⬆️/⬇️ and sudo systemctl start libvirtd etc. appear like magic.

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
    14·
    5 days ago

    Pretty much, yeah.

    Rather than jot down in a text file the various ffmpeg commands I use frequently…

    Raktajino@laptop:~/Downloads$ history | grep ffmpeg
   12  sudo apt install audacity gimp ffmpeg mplayer
  184  history | grep ffmpeg
  215  ffmpeg -i source.mkv -ss 629 -t 7 out.mkv
  217  ffmpeg -i out.mkv -s 0.5 -vf scale=1280:720 out.mp4
  218  ffmpeg -i out.mkv -ss 0.5 -vf scale=1280:720 out.mp4
  231  ffmpeg -i out.mp4 -vf "subtitles=out.srt" final.mp4
  503  ffmpeg -i toofat.wav toofat.mp3
  ...
  682  history | grep ffmpeg
  684  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[1:0] [2:0] concat=n=2" out.gif
  685  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[1:0] [2:0] concat=n=2:v=1" out.gif
  686  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[1:0] [2:0] concat=n=2:v=1" -map '[v]' out.gif
  687  history | grep ffmpeg
  688  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[0:0] 12:0] concat=n=2:v=1" -map '[v]' out.gif
  689  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[0:0] 1:0] concat=n=2:v=1" -map '[v]' out.gif
  690  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[0:0] [1:0] concat=n=2:v=1" -map '[v]' out.gif
  691  ffmpeg -i 1.gif -i 2.gif -filter_complex "[0:0] [1:0] concat=n=2"  out.gif
  694  history | grep ffmpeg
  • Dave@lemmy.nz
    8·
    4 days ago

    Everyone sharing their Ctrl+R tips, here’s my Control+R question:

    How does scope work? Some command history only seems to exist in certain tabs.

    Also sometimes I Ctrl+R in a tab then the command is there but I forget I need a different one first, so I ctrl+c but the next time I search for that original command somehow it doesn’t exist anymore.

    I’m using the default terminal on Nobara (fedora based).

    • Trail@lemmy.world
      12·
      4 days ago

      As far as I remember, there is a bash setting that controls whether the command history is written immediately after execution (in which case it is immediately available on all tabs/windows of the console) or after closing the session (in which case it will be available next time/potentially lost if the window is forcibly closed etc).

      The default is the second one as far as I remember.

      That said, I had changed to a more powerful one in zsh years ago, so it’s been a while…

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
        1·
        4 days ago

        Thanks, I worked it out. Not a setting as such, but you can use PROMPT_COMMAND to run an action to insert into history each time a prompt is run, as described here.

        Though I have started down a rabbit hole of looking at other options for the shell.

    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
      9·
      4 days ago

      This actually doesn’t depend on your terminal but on the shell running inside it. Bash is the default on most distros. I have also frequently had this issue. There might be config to fix it.

      I switched to fish instead of bash, and now I use fzf and the https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish plugin and it works GREAT. There might be a similar thing for bash, I don’t know.