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Comment by mmh0000 | Hacker News Reader

Even easier, press alt+. (fewer keystrokes too! cli golf is fun), it'll copy-and-paste the last parameter from the previous command. If you press . multiple times it'll go further back into your history.

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As I tend to live with set -o vi, [esc] _ gets the same. I hardly ever remember to set:

  bind '"\e."':yank-last-arg

So [esc] _ does it on systems where I haven't customised my environment. A major drawback though is it doesn't go through history like alt . does.

However, when 'set -o vi' is enabled you can easily go through history and edit with familiar vi keystrokes, or press 'fc' and fix the previous command in EDITOR, or 'v' to edit the current command in EDITOR.

Command line vi modes are my bread and butter

I think you meant 'vv' and I wonder if it's not something that's set up by oh-my-zsh ? It's great though

'v' will start the visual editor. 'fc' will edit the previous command. Both invoke EDITOR in bash's vi readline command mode.

I wasn't aware that bash and zsh did it differently, I assumed they'd both use the same readline - now I'm aware there's more to understand about it :)

Ha my bad I assumed zsh because I saw the `bind` command being used. I did not know that it was also in bash

I find that zsh's mode is actually better than readline's For example it can handle visual mode which is why the same function is `vv` and not just `v` Zsh can handle text objects too, very useful to be able to ci" for example Fish's can too and is quite good IIRC

Too bad the `v` command does not work in gdb so it seems it's more of a bash thing than a readline thing

Relevant : https://superuser.com/questions/1543120/make-readline-edit-i...

Often the shortcuts that people point out in these threads are too niche for me to remember, but that seems like a pretty great one, I’ll try to remember it.

alt + . is easy to remember, but did you know you there is a way to recall any argument from the previous command in bash?

Press Escape, then the number of the argument from the previous command, confirm with Ctrl+Alt+Y.

Example:

  > command arg1 arg2 arg3

Escape, 1, Ctrl+Alt+Y gives you arg1.

alt + <number> + alt + . should do the same thing. No need for ctrl+alt+y, is there?

Not sure that would work everywhere but !$ definitely does for retrieving the last arg of the last command. 40 years of muscle memory right there

Alt + . is a readline binding, so that's available wherever GNU readline is used. Immediate examples that come to mind are Python PDB shell and GDB.

And thus you get vim modes there too much if you set your .inputrc for it !

Nobody mentions $_ ? It gives you the last argument used, so:

  cat filename.txt

  grep "what I want" $_

expands "$_" to "filename.txt"

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