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Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

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Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#11
post #2

hstr-rs is a shell history suggest box that provides quick access to the commands in your shell history. Just search for the command you want to execute (regex mode is supported), or, if you don't precisely know what you're looking for, you can browse through the commands until you find the one you want to execute. Apart from this, you can delete unwanted entries from your history, too, and more. It should work on al…

This looks really cool, I’m going to try it out — by the way, what app/tool did you use to record the screencast?

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#12

How is this different than reverse-i-search?

None.

But seems like the trend of the last 10 years is to rewrite every single already existing Unix tool in Rust or node.js. Throwing out code is more fun than reading man pages I guess.

This saddens me. It looks like the average dev in 2020 believes he needs to pollute his working environment with thousands of seemingly useless tools to be productive.

fzf, silver searcher, ripgrep, etc.

I will be downvoted to hell, because these people genuinely believe they need these tools, and will find whatever performance or feature argument to explain why. But from my experience, I am much faster at any command line task than pretty much anyone using these fancy stuff, even though I stick to bash, vim, and coreutils...

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#13
post #12

How is this different than reverse-i-search?

None. But seems like the trend of the last 10 years is to rewrite every single already existing Unix tool in Rust or node.js. Throwing out code is more fun than reading man pages I guess. This saddens me. It looks like the average dev in 2020 believes he needs to pollute his working environment with thousands of seemingly useless tools to be productive. fzf, silver searcher, ripgrep, etc. I will be downvoted to hell,…

The standard tools have a lot of cruft. `grep` being case sensitive by default is I think a good example of a default that used to make sense, but is probably better the other way around today. There are countless other such examples.

Your comment reads as a no-true-scottsman "look how skilled I am" signaling device. You're not necessarily wrong, but you're also clearly fighting a pointless battle, and sound a bit out-of-touch.

Yes, the tools already exist and work. No, they do not need to be re-written, but the new versions are often substantially more usable and newcomers enjoy that. Such is the nature of life. Things change. Accept that and you'll be happier.

Your attitude might win some points with other fight-the-tide-till-my-last-dying-breath types, but it reads to me as "It is the children who are wrong!"

I worked with a guy who had the same attitude about always using kubectl over the gui because it was "faster". He was demonstrably slower at quite a few common tasks, like discovering errors in logs across many pods, than others who used the gui.

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#14
post #12

How is this different than reverse-i-search?

None. But seems like the trend of the last 10 years is to rewrite every single already existing Unix tool in Rust or node.js. Throwing out code is more fun than reading man pages I guess. This saddens me. It looks like the average dev in 2020 believes he needs to pollute his working environment with thousands of seemingly useless tools to be productive. fzf, silver searcher, ripgrep, etc. I will be downvoted to hell,…

You should see my git aliases that makes heavy use of fzf. It definitely speeds me up. `ga` gives an fzf-powered selection only on files in my git status to `git add`. I can cherry pick commits without ever typing a branch or commit hash. Fuzzy-find on reverse search with fzf is way better than the built-in ctrl+r. ripgrep is way better than grep. I could go on.

I appreciate your call to be familiar with the core unix experience, but the unix userland is definitely enriched by these newfangled tools.

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. But seems like the trend of the last 10 years is to rewrite every single already existing Unix tool in Rust or node.js. Throwing out code is more fun than reading man pages I guess. This saddens me. It looks like the average dev in 2020 believes he needs to pollute his working environment with thousands of seemingly useless tools to be productive. fzf, silver searcher, ripgrep, etc. I will be downvoted to hell,…

The standard tools have a lot of cruft. `grep` being case sensitive by default is I think a good example of a default that used to make sense, but is probably better the other way around today. There are countless other such examples. Your comment reads as a no-true-scottsman "look how skilled I am" signaling device. You're not necessarily wrong, but you're also clearly fighting a pointless battle, and sound a bit ou…

Yes it looks much nicer imo. One thing that annoys me with ctrl-r is that if you make a typo and backspace it, you will not be back to where you were. The "cursor" has moved back in history, potentially past the command you were interested in. It's also nice you can see many different matches at the same time.

I kind of think the author should have foreseen this question and provided an answer.

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#17

In case you didn't know, bash has a basic version of this already embedded. You can search your bash history from the command line with Control+R (not Cmd+R even for Macs).

Yes. ZSH has this too. I think the basic shell features can go a long way.

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#18
post #7

This looks cool! I personally use fzf [0] for a similar functionality. It brings fuzzy-search to a lot of aspects of the shell, like reverse search but also autocompletion of `kill` for example. [0]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Same here. With fzf, you don't search - you find. One of my most powerful bash aliases is

alias fzubl='fzf -m | xargs subl'

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#19
post #7

This looks cool! I personally use fzf [0] for a similar functionality. It brings fuzzy-search to a lot of aspects of the shell, like reverse search but also autocompletion of `kill` for example. [0]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

fzf for the win. It’s such a boost of productivity. Everyone who spends significant amount of times in the shell should try it.

Re: Show HN: History suggest box for your shell

#20
post #12

How is this different than reverse-i-search?

None. But seems like the trend of the last 10 years is to rewrite every single already existing Unix tool in Rust or node.js. Throwing out code is more fun than reading man pages I guess. This saddens me. It looks like the average dev in 2020 believes he needs to pollute his working environment with thousands of seemingly useless tools to be productive. fzf, silver searcher, ripgrep, etc. I will be downvoted to hell,…

So which man page from "bash, vim, and coreutils" should I look into to get the equivalent of fzf?
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