hacking and gonzo since 2000
Boosting your console skills
In this little blog post I will share my tips on improving the console with:
These tips work on any Mac OS X, BSD or Linux system. They are aimed towards Bash - which is a standard on most UNIX systems. Improving the historyThe problem with default Bash configuration is that the history is written only when you close a console window. This is a problem if you have 2 windows: They won't share the history and they will eventually override each others history. This is a quick fix, open up your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) and add this: #Bash should append rather than overwrite the history shopt -s histappend #When displaying the prompt, write the previous line to disk PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' That's it for history. If you want real comfort here is some extra configuration that I also use: #Ignore small typos in directory names shopt -s cdspell #Ignore case when completing set completion-ignore-case on #When listing possible file completions, put / after directory names and * on files set visible-stats on Setting up smart completionYou can search in your history by pressing CTRL-R, here is an example of that:
One can do much better completion than CTRL-R. Here is an example of how I use up and down arrows to complete from history:
To get this functionality, paste this into your .inputrc: #Move in history using up and down arrows "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward #On tab show completion set show-all-if-ambiguous on Update your ~/.inputrc and launch a new terminal window, now you can use up and down arrows smartly! If you have any kick-ass console-improvement tips, then post them as comments. 8 comments so far
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