How to let your shell to remember your commands

Whenever you got a new machine, there's always endless configurations porting, codes compilations and packages installations. It is crutial step to make the new machine meets your habits.

Recently, I got access to a new supercomputer for a limited amount of time, I started using it without much configuration. Soon I found myself missing the convenience of auto-suggestion for commands, which I got used to in prevously machines I've wored on.

Auto-suggestion in your shell is basically a plugin/extension that remembers your commands history and provide suggestions when you type in the first few letters of a command. When you find yourself frequently using the same commands (such as ssh to a specific server), it could be really useful.

This is how the suggestions will look like (I'm using zsh-autosuggestions here):

So this article is mainly to give recommendations for both zsh and bash users on how to configure the shell to remember your commands.

1. zsh-autosuggestions for zsh

On my mac, zsh is the default shell, the plugin zsh-autosuggestions is what I want to recommend here. It suggests commands when you type in a zsh shell, and you can simply press the right arrow key to accept the suggestion.

To install it, you can follow the instructions on their github repo. You can use Antigen, Oh My Zsh, Homebrew or manually install it.

I use oh-my-zsh for managing my zsh configurations. Actually I'm using a rather minimal configuration of oh-my-zsh, which consists only 2 plugins. These are the lines to configure oh-my-zsh in my ~/.zshrc:

export ZSH="$HOME/.oh-my-zsh"
ZSH_THEME="alanpeabody"
plugins=(git zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-autosuggestions)
source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

As you can see, to install zsh-autosuggestions you just need to add it to the plugins list, separated by a space, tab, or newline.

There are definitely more to explore in oh-my-zsh, but I'm not going to talk about them in detail here. If you're interested in more configurations, you can always check out the official website or their github repo.

(PS. I also recommend pure as a beautiful and minimal ZSH prompt theme, and it is developed and maintained by my favorite open source and mac apps developer Sindre Sorhus.)

2. ble.sh for bash

For some linux machines, bash is default shell. If you are using bash, I would recommend ble.sh, which stands for Bash Line Editor.

I was looking for a way to let my bash shell to remember my commands, and I found there is a oh-my-bash repo, which is the counterpart of oh-my-zsh, for managing your bash configuration. However, I couldn't find a easy-to-use auto-suggestion plugin that can be installed via oh-my-bash.

Then I found ble.sh, and you can even try it first without installation.

git clone --recursive --depth 1 --shallow-submodules https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh.git
make -C ble.sh
source ble.sh/out/ble.sh

Then try typing in a few commands, you'll find it achieves the same functionality as zsh-autosuggestions, it even gives suggestions on commands that you never used before.

If you like it, you can quickly install it via running the following command:

git clone --recursive --depth 1 --shallow-submodules https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh.git
make -C ble.sh install PREFIX=~/.local
echo 'source ~/.local/share/blesh/ble.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

I hope some of you will find this article useful, and I'm also looking forward to hearing your recommendations on other useful plugins or your shell configurations.