Stop Retyping Commands

Stop retyping the same commands over and over again! Make your computer do some work for you and put some of those GBs of storage and compute power to good use. If, like me, you use the shell a lot this will literally save a chunk of your life. The setup I describe in the following also serves as a kind of long term memory for how to use a certain command or program. You can just search back through all previous commands and quickly refresh your memory on how you have used a command previously.

You might already know the Ctrl-R command to search backward through the history of commands you have typed. If not try it. It is magical. The problem is that those searches have to exactly match parts of the command you are looking for and you can only see the latest command matching your search. In short the default Ctrl-R can be pretty frustrating.

There are way better tools for searching through large text files such as your bash command history. The one I personally use is fzf since it is light weight and fast and integrates well with vim and tmux (more about that some other time). If you only ever use a single terminal at a time just install fzf and start using the new and amazing Ctrl-R: fzf performs fuzzy matching of the string you enter against your history or text file and it displays a sorted list of the best matching strings which is updated in real-time as you type your search. That means you can enter any substring of the command you are looking for and fzf will find it.

It gets more interesting if you have multiple terminals open at the same time (maybe via tmux). In that case the command history fragments and you cannot search a command you typed into one shell in another one. Additionally, commands are lost whenever you close a shell while another one still exists. To circumvent this you can make bash log every command you enter. Simply add the following line to your .bashrc:

export PROMPT_COMMAND='if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]; then echo "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S") $(pwd) $(history 1)" >> ~/.logs/bash-history-$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").log; fi;' 

Bash executes the command in its PROMPT_COMMAND variable right after you hit enter to execute. The if statement makes sure you are not root, and then logs the time, folder and the command into a log file in your home directory ~/.logs/. Make sure to create that directory. An additional advantage of using this command-logging system is that you could easily share the commands between computers.

Next you need to configure fzf to search through all files in the ~/.logs folder to find previously entered commands. To do this replace all occurrences of the command history in your fzf config file ~/.fzf.bash with:

cat ~/.logs/* | cut -f 1,6- --delimiter=\" \"

Now you should be able to use Ctrl-R with fzf across terminals and bash sessions. Enjoy!