Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)

Great write up, had to bookmark so I can go through it more later there so much good stuff in there.

For the CTRL + R tip, you can make it even better if you install fzf. Massively improves searching through history. It's worth the install just for that one feature.

Best thing I ever did as a dev was start spending more time in the terminal. Getting familiar with the tools and how they interact makes life so much easier.

only the people do not use pageup and pagedown is who really know how to use shell

> We’ve all been there.

Close tab.

I ought to migrate away from shell scripting and just keep the shell for interactive use. Unfortunately I have cursed myself by getting competent-ish with P. shell and Bash scripting. Meaning I end up creating maintenance headaches for my future self.

(Echoes of future self: ... so I asked an LLM to migrate my shell scripts to Rust and)

Anyway with the interactive shell stuff. Yeah the I guess Readline features are great. And beyond that I can use the shortcut to open the current line in an editor and get that last mile of interactivity when I want it. I don’t really think I need more than that?

I tried Vim mode in Bash but there didn’t seem to be a mode indicator anywhere. So dropped that.

Edit: I just tested in my Starship.rs terminal: `set -o vi`. Then I got mode indicators. Just with a little lag.

Guilty as charged

What I hate is that if you start a command with a space it is not recorded in the history. This happens often when copy+pasting commands. I know you can turn it off but still ... this drives me mad.

I just open, agent in tui, and ask it to do what I want and make a plan, i read the plan edit it and run it.

Simple, no need to learn any commandline these days.

I used to use arch and all, and managed many big projects. I find little value in learning new tools anymore, just feed it docs and it generated working plan most of the time

Now I've moved to coding in Haskell, which i find suits me better than wasting my time with cli and exploring what options all these cli tools have.