Submitted by Peteris Krumins has written a three-part article series on his blog about using Bash effectively. The three parts are Editing commands in Emacs editing mode, Editing commands in Vi editing mode, and Definitive guide to Bash command line history. All three articles come with ‘cheat sheets’ in .pdf and .txt format so you can memorise the commands and shortcuts easier.
Always good to see an idea that may help folks by making something easier to use. It may be of more practical, day-to-day value than a bigger deal.
I wonder if there’s a bash adaptation for the joe editor, though? I find joe easier than vi for simple tasks. In addition, joe’s magic key is Ctrl, which I find easier and quicker to hit from the keyboard (with my little finger) than vi’s Esc key.
Joes own editor? Wow, I thought I’ve been the only person using it! 🙂 Yes, joe was my favourite editor until I got familiar with the Midnight Commander’s editor mcedit. But still, joe has many useful features that mcedit hasn’t, it even supports syntax highlighting, ^KE along with ^KN, and ^KR, Meta key combinations, the versatile block selection method, and finally it’s very lightweight.
Great article, by the way, I didn’t know that bash’s interactive features had been designed so intelligent and helpful. I’d like to know which of these features are bash exclusively and which are available in standard sh, too (because sh is UNIX’s standard scripting shell – interoperability). It seems that bas has incorporated parts of sed and awk. 🙂
On my BSD systems, csh (i. e. tcsh) is my favourite shell for dialog use. A little bit customization (lines ‘set promptchars = “%#”‘, ‘set prompt = “%n@%m:%~%# “‘ and ‘set autolist’ into /etc/csh.cshrc) and it’s much more comfortable than the standard settings.
^KX
I’ve been using Unix and Linux for almost 10 years now, and had never used the vi mode, until I started my present job about 14 months ago. I spend most of my day in the Solaris console using the Korn shell, and found out real fast that “set -o vi” added to your ~/.profile file could be a life saver!
I couldn’t even think of using the console without the vi mode any longer.
Good set of articles, btw.