My favorite shell shortcut

If I had to name my favorite most awesome shell shortcut, that would be:

Ctrl+R

Reverse history search. It’s supported by bash, zsh and maybe others. The idea is that you can press Ctrl+R and start typing, and the shell will search through every command that you’ve ever executed that contains given characters, starting from the most recent history record. Press Ctrl+R a couple of times while in this mode and the shell will continue the search backwards. Press Enter to execute the command as is or any cursor movement keys to edit the command line. Ctrl+C will cancel the search and bring you back to normal business.

By itself it doesn’t seem like much. However if you think about it, your shell history is a very valuable resourse. For example, do you remember the correct arguments for the tar command to compress a folder into tar.gz archive? Me neither. However, if you’ve done this before at some point, press Ctrl+R and type “.gz”. Or maybe you forgot the IP address of your Rapsberry Pi? Ctrl+R, "ssh " (or even “ssh 192” if you know it’s on your local network).

I learned this approach from Jim Meyering, one of the authors and maintainers of GNU Coreutils. In one of his talks he mentioned he rarely writes shell scrips for one-offs. Instead, it’s much easier to write the command directly into the terminal and then search for it when nessesary.

Ctrl+R is great as it is, however you can make it even more useful by increasing the limit of records your shell keeps in the history file. I have something like this in my shell’s rc file:

HISTFILESIZE=1000000000
HISTSIZE=1000000

Related posts:

Better way to switch between apps on macOS

cdtmp

Geek's guide to making decent slides

Show OSX notification when long running command finishes and your terminal is not in focus