A redditor explains how to make readline and bash more user friendly

http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/kbeoe/you_can_make_readline_and_bash_much_more_user/

by fs111 • 15 years ago

99 29 15 years ago

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

Or just use oh-my-zsh with the fish theme and get all of this (and more) straight away.

fs1112• 15 years ago

That might be true, but where ever you go, there is always bash installed. zsh not so much. Knowing the tools, that you will always find, is a pretty useful skill.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

That is not true at all... if you install FreeBSD out of the box there is no bash installed. Most of my FreeBSD servers don't have bash installed at all because I don't find it necessary at all, tcsh does everything I want it to do.

derleth• 15 years ago

> That might be true, but where ever you go, there is always bash installed. zsh not so much.

Whaddya wanna bet the same argument is being used elsewhere, except with csh/bash or sh/bash as the simple-shell/advanced-shell duo?

(Before anyone gets confused: tcsh is the advanced-shell BSDs come with. csh is the simple one.)

graywh• 15 years ago

If you're going to use a system enough to copy your readline & bash config, it would be just as easy to copy your zsh config and install it in the rare case it's not available.

jkjeldgaard• 15 years ago

I agree with the oh-my-zsh, but why specifically the fish theme?

From what I can gather it only alters the look (https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/blob/master/themes...)

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

Hmm, does it? I installed it right away and it's pretty much exactly like fish (history traversal with arrows, case-insensitive matching, etc). I might be mistaken and it might just be omz.

gnubardt• 15 years ago

Those are great, here are a couple more i find very useful:

  # Search for partial matches in bash history
  # so $ <C-p> goes to the previous command but
  #  $ s<C-p> searches through history entries that start with s
  "\C-p":history-search-backward
  "\C-n":history-search-forward

  # add a trailing '/' when tab completing a symlink
  set mark-symlinked-directories on

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

<C-r> searches through entire history backward, with partial match support

shabble• 15 years ago

It seems to have an annoying habit of preserving the index of the last partial match, even if you cancel it. So when you realise you were searching for the wrong substring, cancel and start over, it won't find it because you've now gone past it in the history list.

I'm still not sure of a decent solution to it (apart from using C-s to search history forward instead)

sltkr• 15 years ago

Personally I've bound history searches to the up/down arrow to make bash behave more like the C-shell in this regard:

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

(This was really the only thing I disliked about bash compared to csh, so imagine my delight when I found out this option existed in readline.)

__rkaup__• 15 years ago

A lot of cross-posts from Reddit lately. Could this mean Reddit is improving?

fs1112• 15 years ago

No, it's just knowing the right subreddits. I found this one via http://redditdirectory.com/856/Programming

rmc3• 15 years ago

Do we need to mention that it's a redditor? This is a useful resource, so it should be submitted to HN, but the title needs editing.

ubernostrum• 15 years ago

Yes, we do need to mention it, since a lot of HN users have deep, deep biases against the idea that anything good happens on reddit :)

skeletonjelly3• 15 years ago

It's a funny label to apply. Arguably, all that it really takes to become a redditor is a username, password, and a captcha.

rmc3• 15 years ago

So then if they create good content, then just link to it. We want to think we're a meritocracy, and we will upvote things if they are good. It's not a popularity contest, nor a political game where we need to "prove" that something/someone is good.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Wow, I was going to ask for a link to the reddit article before realizing that the subreddit was simply heavily themed. I had no idea these settings were flexible and I'm very thankful. Thanks for the cross post and for introducing me to another nice subreddit.

A redditor explains how to make readline and bash more user friendly

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