The Linux shell’s history command is very useful. Typing ‘history’ will list you the last X commands you entered in that shell. Typing CTRL+R will pop up a prompt and allow you to search for a command by typing a section of it.
For example: Hit CTRL+R and then type ’svn’ will list the last svn command you entered. If you have more than one svn command in your history you can cycle through them by typing CTRL+R again until you get to the one you want.
The history and the CTRL+R selector are great; really useful when you need to re-run long-winded command lines. But, I think a GUI version would me way better. The CTRL+R doesn’t always work properly and sometime you can’t find a string in the history even though you know it’s there. It’s possible to accidentally run the wrong command because CTRL+R will always leave you with something from your history at your command prompt and it won’t always be what you wanted. Hastily hitting return on a command you didn’t want could be disastrous.
If you had a small GUI for history you could control your list much easier using the mouse. It’d still let you search for command using a regex input but there’d be no danger of accidentally running it at the command prompt; you’d have to paste it in first. The GUI version could also let you store your favourites so you can quickly re-run command commands. Favourites is probably not the right word to use, you’d have to be a serious geek to have a favourite command line, maybe something like Starred or Saved would be less romantic and geeky.
Maybe this GUI version already exists – searching for “linux history GUI” just throws up a load of links to pages talking about Linux’s progress etc.
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