You'd think that by now, "smart" terminal emulation software would have the ability to remember certain complex commands that it otherwise would take several minutes to [re]construct, or even let you set up templates for composing them.
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@woozle You could even have things like radio buttons and drop-down lists for common variations, and call it a "GUI".
@TimWardCam If you mean within the text of the terminal window rather than as part of the terminal app's GUI/menu stuff -- that's actually a thing; I think it's sometimes called TUI. It used to be very popular in DOS, but there are things like Midnight Commander which still use it.
It works best if you have memory-mapped access to the display, though... or at least it did on PCs running at <10MHz; maybe it doesn't matter now.
(Apologies if this isn't new information.)
@woozle personally, that seems to me more like a job for the shell (i am currently using #fishshell by the delightful @bean, and it has both smart completions for common commands and tools, like git, and also remembers history in a way that makes it easy to take a remembered command, modify it and then execute once again)
@rnd Maybe I should try FishShell... but I kinda feel like if we're using GUI software to do CLI, it's better to use GUI for additional features rather than trying to implement them in CLI, with all its obvious limitations.
Also, I do use the up-arrow feature a lot for repeating commands, but that doesn't work very well across sessions or chunks of time. The command I want may be back there somewhere, but there's no obvious way to search for it.
@woozle ctrl-r? (works in both bash and fish)
also, in fish, if you start typing a command, you'll get a grayed-out suggestion of a recent command that starts the same way, and you can press the right arrow key to just fill it in
@rnd That does pull up a search; I'll try to remember that next time I need it.
(Still: nonobvious. If it had been in a menu, I would have found it years ago.)
