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Comment by farisjarrah | Hacker News Reader

GNU Readline is really quite a remarkable piece of technology that everyone uses and yet hardly anyone has any idea how to actually use it efficiently.

Along the same lines of the article, these things have served me well:

This one is great for just getting the quick commands to help you get around the command line more efficiently

https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html

This one gives you all the exhaustive options around how you can tweak readline via your inputrc file

https://linux.die.net/man/3/readline

Its sounds really dumb, but after getting to know the bash and readline man pages I have stopped using fish and zsh and just started using more vanilla bash and built in linux tools and its been fantastic. I don't feel like I have lost any productivity and my terminal is a lot more responsive.

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The long-form documentation is really useful:

https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html - GNU Readline User Interface (info rluserman)

https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html - The GNU Readline Library (info readline, long-form equivalent to the readline(3) man page)

Why these are hidden away on some random .edu web site rather than being under gnu.org... -\_:/_/-

(OK, to be fair it's on the official GNU Readline web page, but why _that_ isn't on gnu.org is the real source of my shrug!)

The Bash manual also includes a brief summary of readline usage (I guess they too didn't know where to find Readline's official documenation) and can be read at https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-... or info '(bash)Readline'.

GNU Readline, for those who doesn't know, also comes with vi mode, where you can search with '/' and '?' keys. You can enable it with 'set -o vi' in bash shell or putting 'set editing-mode vi' it in ~/.inputrc.

If you put it in ~/.inputrc, you will get vi mode in all tools/shells which are using Readline like mysql, rlwrap, psql...

https://github.com/pkrumins/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet...

If using readline in vi-mode, I recommend also setting `set show-mode-in-prompt on` to provide visual feedback on which mode you're in. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I walk away from a repl for quite a while (weeks sometimes) and when I come back to it I stumble for a moment because it wasn't in the mode I was expecting.

Agreed, I just wish it could be a bit more customisable. like so https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?109610

It's completely customizable! Just takes some creativity.

https://superuser.com/a/1467056/731833

vi command line editing mode is required by POSIX (see under EXTENDED DESCRIPTION at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...)

Wow ! I have been using set -o vi for years but somehow completely missed that / and ? were available ! Thanks !

The line editing is good, as well as reverse search. I don't find myself using anything else sadly.

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