Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

1. A bash prompt can be editted in both Vi mode and Emacs mode. The default is Emacs mode. You can turn on the Vi mode by set -o vi in .bashrc. This will make all bash prompts be edited in a limited single-line Vi mode.

2. The fc command edits the last shell command (using $EDITOR) and then send it for execution.

3. The shortcut ctrl+x ctrl+e edits the current shell prompt using $VISUAL or $EDITOR. If you want to use neovim as the editor, add the following configuration into your shell configuration.

   export VISUAL=nvim
   export EDITOR=nvim
   

   This is the recommended way to edit shell prompts as it allows your the full power and flexibility of the Vim editor. For example,

   • You are not limited to single-line editing of a single command.
     • You can span a complicated command to multiple lines using \.
     • You can split a complicated command into multiple simpler commands on multiple lines. On quiting Vim, those commands will be run in sequential.
   • If you find that you need information from historical commands while editing a prompt, you can bring historical commands in using the following command in Vim.

     :r ! fc -ln -10
     

   Notice that the shortcut ctrl+x ctrl+e doesn't work out-of-the-box in the terminal in Visual Studio Code. For more discussions, please refer to Configuraing Terminal in Visual Studio Code
   .

4. fzf.history allows you to search through shell command history, select one, editing it in $EDITOR, and then send the edited command for execution.

References

• VISUAL vs. EDITOR – what’s the difference?

• How do I edit current shell command in VI

• Recall the Previous Command or Its Arguments in Bash

• After years of bash, I actually found a shortcut I never heard about.

• Edit any command line in vim