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phformstoday at 5:54 PM3 repliesview on HN

The thing with a lot of these tricks is that you have to get into the habit of using them. I knew `Ctrl+r` for history since I learned about the command line. I even have a nice shell integration with fzf. But I still used the up/down arrow keys for years or scrolled up when I was looking for a previous command, because I never remembered the shortcut and just took the path of least resistance to find something.

Usually what I do is writing these tricks down to a document that is easily accessible at a place where I know that I will look for when failing to remember them. I have a directory of docs where I write stuff like this down by language/tool/etc., so I can quickly look it up without having to search the internet. But I also have to actively remind myself that these things exist whenever I have a problem, stop me from just doing the inefficient thing.


Replies

dec0dedab0detoday at 7:39 PM

I was my most effective when I had a bunch of cheat sheets taped up in my workspace.

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diathtoday at 6:04 PM

> But I still used the up/down arrow keys for years or scrolled up when I was looking for a previous command

It's not even that bad of a habit with zsh either where it will only scroll through history matching a substring in your history, for instance if I type "rg -i" and then start pressing up arrow, it will only cycle through history entries starting with "rg -i".

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quirinotoday at 6:23 PM

atuin kind of fixes this habit, when you click up you get a list of the latest commands, and you can just start typing to search. It's extremely natural.

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