Thanks to Power Shell Usage: Bash Tips & Tricks I just made an incredibly neat addition to my .inputrc file:
"\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward
With these settings bash and any programs that use readline will allow you to search your history for commands that start the same using the arrow keys. You can f.ex. type “ssh” and then page through all previous command lines which start with “ssh” just by hitting arrow keys. Very handy!
The only thing I wonder is: why the heck is this not the default?!
Next up is a two-line addition to my .screenrc:
caption always ' %0c:%0s | %w' termcapinfo xterm*|rxvt* 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007' # pass hardstatus thru to xterm
The caption setting causes screen to display a clock and a “task bar” listing the names of all windows in that screen session at the bottom of the terminal. The second line makes screen pass the “hardstatus” messages through to graphical terminal emulators to be displayed as the window title.
None of this is earth-shaking, but they’re all very neat little touches that make life just a little less frustrating.
Again I wonder why any of this should have taken so much digging through documentation and surfing on the web to run across. Things like these should be included in default configs shipped with distributions. Sure, some picky users won’t like the defaults, but picky users always end up tweaking settings anyway. Meanwhile, non-picky users will forever live with the defaults, however crappy. Their lives would be a lot easier if defaults were useful, not minimal. Sigh.
Very cool and most useful...
