Ctrl+r was a life-changer when I first learned it.

I’ve been using McFly to do my history searching. It’s pretty good. I recommend changing the default sort from rank to time though

Shout out to the very fine Atuin.sh. Give it a try, you won’t regret it.

New to Linux as my daily driver. This is life changing. I was up/down arrowing like a madman!

If you have fzf installed, it is easy to integrate it with your bash history. In my .bashrc, I have:

# Introduce fzf-driven functionality as described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fzf.
source /usr/share/fzf/key-bindings.bash
source /usr/share/fzf/completion.bash

Also, you may be interested in zoxide, which keeps track of paths you have navigated to. Also from my .bashrc:

# Enable an autojump-like 'j' command. Use 'ji M' to select paths starting with M using fzf.
# This needs to always come last.
eval "$(zoxide init --cmd j bash)"

I'm using hstr since some years and it works perfect for me. https://github.com/dvorka/hstr

Am I blind or is ctrl+R not in that document?

To use the last argument of the last ran command, use the Alt+. keys.

Sounds like a poor-man’s !$ to me!

       yank-last-arg (M-., M-_)
              Insert  the last argument to the previous command (the last word
              of the previous history entry).  With a numeric argument, behave
              exactly  like  yank-nth-arg.   Successive calls to yank-last-arg
              move back through the history list, inserting the last word  (or
              the  word  specified  by the argument to the first call) of each
              line in turn.  Any numeric argument supplied to these successive
              calls  determines  the direction to move through the history.  A
              negative argument switches the  direction  through  the  history
              (back or forward).  The history expansion facilities are used to
              extract the last word, as if the "!$" history expansion had been
              specified.

is there a way to save commands from history? i tried to figure this out when i was starting to use linux regularly, to help learn commands and to make a reference for myself as to what the commands do. i’m familiar with things like man, info, tldr and others but i wanted to put things in my own words since i remember better that way.

what i’m wanting but can’t seem to automate: -save commands from bash history to a file with only the command and arguments used, no line numbers or time stamps. -filenames can be kept, but if filenames are removable easily, that would be better. -file saved in should have the list sorted with any duplicates removed and happen after any terminal session ends. -i’ve read about changing the prompt but not done it correctly and not sure if possible or the safest way. -i’ve tried using .bash_logout but it doesn’t seem to do anything and i’m not sure why.

this isn’t too important anymore, as i’ve grown more comfortable with linux and bash but it bugs me that i never got it to work. i can copy and paste more detailed notes of what i tried but i’d need to redact a bunch of cursing and frustrated whining.

Why date time isn’t turned on by default I’ll never know.

As a noob where do I find more handy tips like this? Alone with handy/popular apps?

Almost every windows app I had was on Linux (most were FOSS already) but I know there will be some unique or interesting ones.

For example in android there is Obtanium now to update apps direct from git, or the many was to use YT without ads.

Here’s something I use to search history for commands or keywords. I have this as a function in my profile:

function hgr() {
    history | grep "$1"
}

history grep

Usage: hgr git to search for commands containing git.

Someone more knowledgeable may be able to point out ways to improve this.

I have a bash function in fuzzy_arg that I bind to Alt-a to uses fzf for interactively inserting arguments from previous commands. It’s Ctrl-r for Alt-. – I’ve found it super useful for essentially inserting partial commands (single arguments) from the history

I always use reverse search. But, it is always good to learn something new.

github.com/atuinsh/atuin