^R is useful. But for me, there's something even more useful than searching for a string in your history using ^R: completing the line you're currently typing from your history using Alt-p. This comes in handy when you realize, after typing a few words, that you don't remember the arguments you need.
Say you start typing "ssh ex". If you hit Alt-p, you get "ssh example.com"; hit the key another time, and you get "ssh example2.com" (or whatever you've `ssh`ed into in the past). A matching line has to begin with what you've typed so far, so it will match "ssh ex.com" but not "echo ssh ex.com".
To get this behavior in zsh, you can use the following:
By the way, if using the alt key is cumbersome (as it is on OSX), just press once Esc (and release) and then press p, which in the terminal is always equivalent to simultaneously pressing Alt-p. It's also easier for my fingers to reach, given the different positions of the Alt key, so I tend to use Esc instead of Alt.
Using Ctrl - P or Ctrl - N on an empty command line will just cycle through all your past commands.
Now if the line begins by vim, then pressing Ctrl - P will cycle just through all your previous vim commands
Greatness!
I have history-search-backward and its reverse mapped to page up and page down. A rare few Linux distributions enable them by default, but the rest frequently have a commented example in /etc/inputrc that can be copied to your ~/.inputrc (note that programs using editline instead of readline will need additional configuration).
Me too. And not entering anything gives normal arrow up, so there's no loss.
BTW: ^r is a little more powerful: it is /string/ while this one is /^string/
BTW ^r annoyance: you can't type and then hit ^r. You have to hit ^r first. Seems easy to fix...
BTW tip: if you like readline features, consider rlwrap: it wraps its argument (which is your command) in readline. e.g. rlwrap python. Especially nice to wrap your own interactive cmdline tool.
My favorite one (I digress) is that you can use ^[something]^[something else] to replace [something] with [something else] in the last command. Great for typos, or for repeated commands with few different arguments.
I prefer how ZSH or FiSH does this, fuzzy matching without the need to remember the command/binary but can match the servername or a variable and no need for C-r
I think the Control-R that readline provides just does string matching on the history. I can do Control-R ssh to find the last ssh command, or I can do Control-R blah to find the last time I used that word anywhere in a command line.
I've got a long ssh command that I use to connect to a server and set up some tunnels and I always enter it by doing Control-R and looking for part of the server's name. If it ever falls of the end of my history I'm in trouble.
I prefer using vi bindings (from bash type "set -o vi" to enable) to the ^R method. If you know vi/vim then the results you get are very intuitive.
Hit Esc to enter vi mode and then hit "/". Type your search and hit enter. If the first result that comes up isn't what you are looking for then hit "n" for the next result. To go backwards do Shift + "n".
So that's what it is! I was just getting increasingly frustrated, wondering why "?" wasn't working.
I guess staying intuitive is a difficult game to play, when your premise (the default / most useful searching order) is inherently different from the norm.
People get used to this and start hitting up >20 times to get back to a command they ran a while back. Often they overshoot too and have to scroll back.
It's the weaker little brother to ctrl-r, only useful for commands ran 1,2 invokes ago.
ctrl-r is more functional I'd say
Control-R will work with anything that uses readline and keeps history. In addition to working in the Unix shell, it also works in psql (the PostgreSQL tool) and the Python REPL.
Another way to take advantage of ctrl+r is to add a comment at the end of the line when you have very similar commands. e.g.
ssh fred@127.0.0.1 #servername
ffmpeg -some -long -incantation #vid2mp3
It's better than an alias or function in your rc file as you can easily edit to change some args
I've had this in place for a very long time, since I use vim for most of my editing/coding, but recently I've took a look at emacs. I'm far from being anywhere near proficient in emacs and my main editor is still vim. Also I don't like the fact emacs uses meta so much since on a macbook pro laptop keyboard it isn't so obvious to reach, while I did set my caps-lock key to ESC/Control, and even my tab acts as hyper when combined with another keypress.
I did however remove that binding and use the emacs commands in my terminal, because.. why not stay a fit flexible..
I'd do this, but the lack of indication of the editing mode you're in destroys how useful this'd be to me (I'd have to paranoidly hit Esc all the time).
Even if you join an existing session (eg: pairing) you can type "set -o vi", then type " set -o emacs" when you're done to return the shell to "normal" mode.
Also HISTIGNORE if you want to ignore specific commands, or export HISTFILE=/dev/null to disable history storage. HISTSIZE=0 also works, though it disables all history commands for the present shell, whereas HISTFILE merely fails to save them to file on exit.
OP here: Yeah, I'm rather surprised and frustrated that my server went down due to this traffic. It has handled much more than this in the past without an issue. I'm looking into the problem, and hope to have a solution very soon.
As you can see, one of the items here is "isearch", and it's both bold and underlined, with a yellow foreground and red background. I set that up as part of a custom theme that I wrote for oh-my-zsh.
I'm not sure if zle_highlight is part of the standard zsh package. I'm sure that there is a way to get bash to do something similar, but I don't know what it would be. (I switched from bash to zsh about 4-5 years ago, and have only good things to say.)
One wonders how long it takes people to figure these things out. Incremental reverse search with ctrl-r is not new and does not require a "modern" shell unless you've been using Unix forever, in which case you surely knew about it already.
Anyway just wait until this person figures out ctrl-a and ctrl-e and alt-. Then minds will truly be blown.
OP here: I've been using Unix as my primary desktop, and Emacs as my primary editor, since 1988. I've known about these keybindings for a heckuva long time. But I keep encountering people who don't, and who are delighted to learn something new. I thought that it would be nice to share, that's all.
What a strange fit of pique. I make extensive use emacs chords to navigate in the shell, and I show them to people all the time if they seem curious. It never occurred to me to be outraged if somebody didn't already know. I suppose I occasionally lose patience with people as I wait for them to find "Copy" and "Paste" in the Edit menu, although I try to bear it silently rather than berating them.
The bash manpage runs 103 pages (bash | pr | less). That's quite a few features to learn. In my case, ^R was something I didn't discover for 3-4 years, until I saw a co-worker navigating history far faster than I'd seen before (I was aware of Bourne and csh history commands). And that was after over a decade of Unix use.
zsh has 17 manual pages, or zshall which combines them into one, concise, easily absorbed 483 page manual.
Ignorance is curable. Cluelessness (and spite) aren't. Many Linux tools have copious feature sets of which many users, even advanced ones, know only a small fraction of.
Say you start typing "ssh ex". If you hit Alt-p, you get "ssh example.com"; hit the key another time, and you get "ssh example2.com" (or whatever you've `ssh`ed into in the past). A matching line has to begin with what you've typed so far, so it will match "ssh ex.com" but not "echo ssh ex.com".
To get this behavior in zsh, you can use the following:
By the way, if using the alt key is cumbersome (as it is on OSX), just press once Esc (and release) and then press p, which in the terminal is always equivalent to simultaneously pressing Alt-p. It's also easier for my fingers to reach, given the different positions of the Alt key, so I tend to use Esc instead of Alt.