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Enhanced Bash

The first thing I do when I install a new Linux on my machine is updating .inputrc and .bashrc files to support “Enhanced Bash”. These improves might look minor at first glance, but they had improved my experience with the shell very much.

The main features you achieve by enabling “Enhanced Bash” are:

1. Easily match previously typed commands from partial input. Doing this is as easy as typing the beginning of the command and hitting page up/down to scroll through history.

2. Share history between terminals: When you close a terminal you don’t lose the command history.

3. Let grep highlight matched words with a different color. Very useful.

To enable these features, open your ~/.inputrc file and type this:

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# -------- Bind page up/down wih history search ---------

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

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

# -------- more sane command matching --------------------

#do not show hidden files in the list

set match-hidden-files off

#removes the annoying "-- more --" prompt for long lists

set page-completions off

#show the "Display all 123 possibilities? (y or n)" prompt

# only for really long lists

set completion-query-items 350

# show the list at first TAB, instead of beeping and

# waiting for a second TAB to do that

# uncomment next line to enable

#set show-all-if-ambiguous on

And append these to ~/.bashrc

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#Make sure all terminals save history

shopt -s histappend

PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

#Increase history size

export HISTSIZE=1000

export HISTFILESIZE=1000

#Use GREP color features by default

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto'

You can learn more about this in the original post in Ubuntu Wiki

Hope somebody will find this useful

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Tags: Bash, Linux, Terminal