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Remembering the Command Line

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Coding, Linux on June 17, 2009 at 1:04 pm

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I’m quite a fan of the command line, I remember when GUI’s (graphical user interfaces) were called WIMPS (windows icons mouse pointing systems).  However, I’m a bit rubbish at typing and I have a memory like a whatsit, one of those things with holes in, er…
Anyway the greatest addition to the command line is some kind of memory buffer. Unix systems seemed to have had up arrow to scroll back through previous commands for ever, DOS originally came with this weird system of F1,F2,F3,F4,F5,ESC (copy a char, skip a char, copy up to, skip up to, end here, cancel all) which I was highly adept in my time and then came DOSKEY which not only had an up arrow history but F8 for find.
Linux doesn’t seem to have caught up with the F8 which is such a useful bit. You know you typed some long complicated copy command but how far back in the buffer? Just type “copy” & F8 will find all the copy’s in the history.
And what about something predictive? Browsers remember previous text box entries and match them up to what you are typing or to a load of sponsored text you might want to enter. Just because I type “vi” into google doesn’t mean I want a virgin credit card or viagra but if I did (and apparently people do) it would save some typing. Isn’t it time command lines did this too?
I expect they do - I just need someone to tell me what tools I should load to get it to happen…

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Pingback by XkiD | Remembering the Command Line | blog.xkid.ro - June 17, 2009 on 1:33 pm

[…] rest is here: Remembering the Command Line Posted in News | Tags: aided, memory-like, originally-came, scroll-back, weird-system, […]

Comment by FernaLima - June 17, 2009 on 2:29 pm

For the “search” function:
in bash, type CTRL-R .
now type some part of that long longn command you typed a while back ago, it will be completed automatically.

The auto-completion feature: type TAB. example.
you want to CD to a directory that has ThisReallyLongName. So you type : cd This it will auto complete the name, or, if more than one option is available, show you all.
Bash rocks!

Comment by Dave F - June 24, 2009 on 9:42 am

Thanks! I’ll give ^R a try. I use TAB a lot, I have to say that windows has the edge again as you can set which char auto-enters the directory / file, you set dir and file to different chars and if there are several matching it offers them in turn. I have ^F for file & ^D for dir but I’m not sure that I didn’t prefer TAB for both.

(MY) Linux just lists the matches and expects you to type enough to id one of them and then hot TAB again.

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