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

Post by thibran » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

mmh0000 wrote: post #206

thibran wrote: post #201

Its almost ironical that we still use the Terminal - and many use it like in the eighties using Bash - and seem to have forgotten that we should invent a better terminal & shell than doing all the workarounds to handle the quirks of the current systems.

Make a better system, and we'll consider using it. A Terminal + Bash/ZSH is soooo sticky because they are VERY good at what they do once you learn the basics and quirks. And now with LLMs, CLIs are even better because LLMs talk in text and CLIs talk in text. Microsoft tried with PowerShell to design a better system; it "technically" is better, but not "better enough" to justify the cost of switching (on Linux). The s…

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #18

Using 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.

Post by naikrovek » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

alberto-m wrote: post #81

One 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

Post by philsnow » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

idoubtit wrote: post #208

hikarudo wrote: post #29

One trick I use all the time: You're typing a long command, then before running it you remember you have to do some stuff first. Instead of Ctrl-C to cancel it, you push it to history in a disabled form. Prepend the line with # to comment it, run the commented line so it gets added to history, do whatever it is you remembered, then up arrow to retrieve the first command. $ long_command $ #long_command $ stuff_1 $ stu…

You missed an easier alternative that was in the article: ctrl-u saves and clears the current line, then you can input new commands, then use ctrl-y to yank the saved command. With zsh, I prefer to use alt-q which does this automatically (store the current line, display a new prompt, then, after the new command is sent, restore the stored line). It can also stack the paused commands, e.g.: $ cp foo/bar dest/ $ wcurl…

  $ asdf
  $                  # now kill ring is ["asdf"]
  $ qwerty
  $                  # now kill ring is ["qwerty", "asdf"]
  $             # "yank", pastes the thing at the top of the kill ring
  $ qwerty      # "yank-pop", replaces the thing just yanked with the next
                     # thing on the ring, and rotates the ring until the next yank
  $ asdf

Post by goplayoutside » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

fellerts wrote: post #8

CTRL + W usually deletes everything until the previous whitespace, so it would delete the whole '/var/log/nginx/' string in OP's example. Alt + backspace usually deletes until it encounters a non-alphanumeric character. Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...