I found this one a little while back and figured I might as well share it out since not that many people I talk to seem to know about it. For the longest time if I wanted to search through all my old commands I would do something like this:

history | less

and just kind of wade my way through previously executed commands not very efficient. Once I started getting lazier and the list of items in my history cache grew I started to use this one:

history | grep -i "bleh"

This is a little better, but still a lot more searching and typing than I want. Finally, thanks to the helpful folks over at reddit, I stumbled across this hidden gem:

Ctrl + r "bleh"

So, just press Ctrl then R keys and then a piece of the command you are looking for, bleh in this example, then just hit tab to pull the command up you were looking for once you have enough of the string matched. This is a shortcut that executes the “reverse-i-search” command, and it is freakin awesome. So if there was a command you ran a really long time ago and can’t remember the syntax 100% but know the general idea you can use this to capture the pieces you do remember, saving yourself all that extra time of having to go back through trying to figure out what the hell you were doing.

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So I’ve been getting acclimated to my new environment at work and have been thinking more and more about how much I miss Linux and the command line.  The new environment is nearly entirely a Windows based environment and I feel like my productivity has dropped without the option for using the command line, hence the title of this article.  It seems like the most productive aspect of my Windows experience is using a web browser.

At my previous place of employment I got so used to command line that I take it for granted now as I could do nearly all of my daily work from the command line (aside from web browsing, and email I never made that jump).  In this post I would like to highlight some of the command line tools that I am talking about and how they contributed to my productivity in a former life (although I still take advantage of them at home obviously).

The first and most important piece of the command line experience is getting a good terminal multiplexer, I have played with both screen and tmux but have to say out of the two I like using tmux more.  Both of them can do nearly identical things but I just became more attached to tmux the more that I played with it, one thing that drew me in was the quick and easy screen splitting functionality of tmux.

After much experimentation I finally have a .tmux.conf config file that I feel comfortable with that utilizes all of the settings I like and need as well as the bindings to match those in screen along with a few other neat tricks.

# This configuration file binds many of the common GNU screen key bindings to
# appropriate tmux key bindings. Note that for some key bindings there is no
# tmux analogue and also that this set omits binding some commands available in
# tmux but not in screen.#
# Note this is a good starting point but you should check out the man page for more
# configuration options if you really want to get more out of tmux

### Unbind existing tmux key bindings (except 0-9).

# Set the prefix to ^A.
unbind C-b
set -g prefix ^A
bind a send-prefix

# Bind appropriate commands similar to screen.
# lockscreen ^X x
unbind ^X
bind ^X lock-server
unbind x
bind x lock-server

# screen ^C c
unbind ^Cbind ^C new-window
bind cbind c new-window

# detach ^D d
unbind ^D
bind ^D detach

# displays *
unbind *
bind * list-clients

# next ^@ ^N sp n
unbind ^@
bind ^@ next-window
unbind ^N
bind ^N next-window
unbind " "
bind " " next-window
unbind n
bind n next-window

# other ^A
unbind ^A
bind ^A last-window

# prev ^H ^P p ^?
unbind ^H
bind ^H previous-window
unbind ^P
bind ^P previous-window
unbind p
bind p previous-window
unbind BSpace
bind BSpace previous-window

# windows ^W w
unbind ^W
bind ^W list-windows
unbind w
bind w list-windows

# quit \
unbind \
bind \ confirm-before "kill-server"

# kill K k
unbind K
bind K confirm-before "kill-window"
unbind k
bind k confirm-before "kill-window"

# redisplay ^L l
unbind ^L
bind ^L refresh-client
unbind l
bind l refresh-client

# More straight forward key bindings for splitting
unbind %
bind | split-window -h
bind v split-window -h
unbind '"'
bind - split-window -v
bind h split-window -v

# History
set -g history-limit 10000

# Terminal emulator window title
set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string '#S:#I.#P #W'

# Status Bar
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg white
set -g status-interval 1
#set -g status-left '#[fg=green]#H#[default]'
set -g status-left '#[fg=green](#S) #(whoami)@#(host `hostname` | cut -d " " -f 4)'
set -g status-right '#[fg=yellow]#(cut -d " " -f 1-4 /proc/loadavg)#[default] #[fg=cyan,bold]%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S#[default]'

# Notifying if other windows has activities
setw -g monitor-activity on
set -g visual-activity on

# Highlighting the active window in status bar
setw -g window-status-current-bg red

# Clock
setw -g clock-mode-colour green
setw -g clock-mode-style 24

# Hostname and IP address
#set -g status-right '#[fg=white]#(hostname)@#(host `hostname` | cut -d " " -f 4)'
#set -g status-right '#[fg=white]#(host `hostname` | cut -d " " -f 4)'

The most important part of how you utilize your tmux experience is the management of your sessions.  Within tmux I usually have at least four terminals open for various different tasks.  At least one term for bash, one for Irssi command line IRC client, one for ipython python interpreter and one for editing text files (I use Vim but that is separate topic).   Once you get comfortable with the key combinations for navigation and other tasks, tmux can increase your productivity a great deal. As I stated, in my daily work the only things I don’t use the command line for are email and web browsing, which I know is possible I just never tired to make the switch. I would still like to do at some point in the future.

If you have any command line-fu you would like to share let me know or post in the comments section I always love hearing about what others are doing and incorporating it into my own bag of tricks.

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