Maybe not a shell trick per-se but I have been a very big fan of zoxide. It can jump around your common directories. If you have a ~/workspace/projects and you are anywhere and type `cd projects` it will take you to that directory. I never realized how much I got hooked onto it, until I used a system without it.
Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
91–100 of 287 posts
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theirs "turns off" one element of a pipeline; yours turns off everything after a certain point. This will output the stdout of mycmd1: mycmd1 #| mycmd2 | mycmd3 This will output the stdout of mycmd3: mycmd1 | \# mycmd2 | mycmd3
Can you explain to me why either of these is useful? I've somehow gotten by never really needing to pipe any commands in the terminal, probably because I mostly do frontend dev and use the term for starting the server and running prodaccess
Pipelines are usually built up step by step: we run some vague, general thing (e.g. a `find` command); the output looks sort of right, but needs to be narrowed down or processed further, so we press Up to get the previous command back, and add a pipe to the end. We run that, then add something else; and so on.
Now let's say the output looks wrong; e.g. we get nothing out. Weird, the previous command looked right, and it doesn't seem to be a problem with the filter we just put on the end. Maybe the filter we added part-way-through was discarding too much, so that the things we actually wanted weren't reaching the later stages; we didn't notice, because everything was being drowned-out by irrelevant stuff that that our latest filter has just gotten rid of.
Tricks like this `\#` let us turn off that earlier filter, without affecting anything else, so we can see if it was causing the problem as we suspect.
As for more general "why use CLI?", that's been debated for decades already; if you care to look it up :-)
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#93great list but really overboard on the AI generated persona
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#94> 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. Yea…
You can use `set vi-ins-mode-string` and `set vi-cmd-mode-string` in .inputrc to get indicators in readline, and you can add them to your prompt with a bit more work: https://superuser.com/questions/1466222/move-vi-mode-string-...
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#95With ctrl+r, if you press it twice, it will autofill the search with whatever you last searched for. pressing it more will go back through the history. Been using that a lot recently when doing docker stuff. ctrl+r, type the container name, keep going until I get the compose build command. ctrl+r, ctrl+r, repeat until the log command. Then I can just mash ctrl+r to get the build and log commands. Ctrl+r is your frien…
Make sure to add fzf + shell integration for maximum Ctrl+r goodness.
Also worth reading the intro to fzf search syntax.
https://junegunn.github.io/fzf/search-syntax.
The $ and bang and exact search are neat, but the bit at the bottom as to why `gadd` or `gas` is a better search for `git add something` than something with full words and spaces is a revelation when first using fzf.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of esc, type ctrl [
Does it help a lot? You've still got a three to type which is a crime, plus some letters, only to move 3 words. My typing skills are not great, but that sounds like an awful lot of work(?) If I hit CTRL + ARROW_LEFT 3 times, I am done a lot faster I guess. But I am open to learn, do people really use that and achieve the goal significantly faster?
I think it’s a difference in how people think. I can’t remember hotkeys. It just doesn’t compute. But with vim style bindings it’s much closer to writing a sentence. `3`, number of times, `b`, beginning of word, `c`, change, `w`, word. Yea it’s a lot. I cannot explain why it’s simpler for me to learn that than emacs style bindings but it is.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#97One thing I find life-changing is to remap the up arrow so that it does not iterates through all commands, but only those starting with the characters I have already written. So e.g. I can type `tar -`, then the up arrow, and get the tar parameters that worked last time. In zsh this is configured with bindkey "^[OA" up-line-or-beginning-search # Up bindkey "^[OB" down-line-or-beginning-search # Down
Once you start using CTRL+r, you may find that you never reach for up arrow again.
And once you want to one-up this look into fzf.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#98Using the terminal becomes much more cozy and comfortable after I activate vim-mode. A mistake 3 words earlier? No problem: 3bcw and I'm good to go. Want to delete the whole thing? Even easier: cc I can even use v to open the command inside a fully-fledged (neo)vim instance for more complex rework. If you use (neo)vim already, this is the best way to go as there are no new shortcuts to learn and memorize.
I've been a (n)vim user for 20+ years now, but I hate vi-mode in the shell. However if I feel that I need to do a complex command, I just do ctrl-x+e to open up in neovim (with EDITOR=nvim set). I find it a good middle ground.
I'm the same and in my opinion this is the best of both worlds. Taking the time to learn some of the regular (emacs-style) shortcuts is one of the best investments I've ever done. Even just CTRL+Y and the likes.
edit: And of course, CTRL+R, the best time saver of all
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#99What 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.
AFAIK that setting is opt-in, at least in Bash.
Yeah but some operating systems have HISTIGNORE in (or sourced from) their skeleton files.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#100Using the terminal becomes much more cozy and comfortable after I activate vim-mode. A mistake 3 words earlier? No problem: 3bcw and I'm good to go. Want to delete the whole thing? Even easier: cc I can even use v to open the command inside a fully-fledged (neo)vim instance for more complex rework. If you use (neo)vim already, this is the best way to go as there are no new shortcuts to learn and memorize.
> cc Doing control+o in insert mode temporarily places you into normal mode so that you can execute one normal-mode command, and then go back to insert mode again--no need to hit 'i' again. So, instead of ' cc', ' S'.
The vim version is much easier, if you ask me: 3 strokes, 2 keys and 0 combinations.
The one you suggest however requires 4 strokes (ctrl then o then shift then s), 4 keys (ctrl, o, shift, s) and 2 combinations.
The "cc" sequence deletes the line and switches automatically to insert mode. To forgo the switch, the sequence then becomes "dd".