Question

I recently made the insanely long overdue switch from tcsh to bash.
The only thing I miss is tcsh’s ESC+p feature:
Start typing a command and then hit ESC+p (I actually found the equivalent ctrl-[p easier to type) and it jumps to the most recent command in your history that starts with what you’ve typed so far.

Perhaps the best answer is to just get used to bash’s Ctrl+r but so far I don’t like it as much.
I often start typing a command and then it occurs to me that I’ve issued it before.
With tcsh’s feature I could then do ESC+p+Enter to re-issue it. It’s so quick that I’d usually never use up-arrow for anything more than 2 commands ago.

An example of where I found it especially nice:
Long commands often start with a dot, because they’re of the form

./myprogram.pl -lots -of -args -and -switches

In tcsh I would issue a command like that, then maybe ls, less, tail, whatever, and then to reissue the long command, 4 keys: dot, escape, p, enter.

How can I do that in Bash? Or, to make it concrete, what’s the fewest number of keystrokes in bash to say “repeat the last command that started with a dot”? Can it match or beat tcsh’s 4?

Answer 1

Add this to your ~/.inputrc file:

"\e[5~": history-search-backward
"\e[6~": history-search-forward

This will make PageUp act like tcsh’s Esc+p and PageDown will go forward through the list.

You can bind \ep instead. If you use PageUp / PageDown, you may need to see what character sequence your keyboard/terminal produces. Just press Ctrl+V then PageUp and you’ll see ^[[5~ if it’s the same as \e[5~.