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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Shell command history (was: Useless Use Of Regexes)
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:55:05 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 9 Apr 2025 13:26:48 +0100, Geoff Clare wrote:

> On 4/8/25 9:16 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 08 Apr 2025 15:39:47 +0300, Anssi Saari wrote:
>> 
>>> The only time I've had to use vi command history editing was with
>>> some old version of VxWorks. It was the only kind included by
>>> default. I ended up teaching some colleagues on how to edit the
>>> command line, vi style.
>> 
>> Seems a bit dumb, having to go into insert mode every time you
>> actually want to type a command.
> 
> That's not how it works.

But that’s how the vi/vim editor family works. Are you saying that a 
command-line editor that is supposed to work like those editors doesn’t in 
fact, emulate them entirely faithfully?

> After the shell writes a command prompt, it is
> in insert mode, so you just type a command as normal.  To edit the
> current command, or search the history, you type ESC to get out of
> insert mode and then perform the edit or search just like in vi (except
> that RETURN executes the edited command instead of moving to the next
> "line").

Seems like a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth.

> It became an IEEE standard in 1992 (and ISO in 1993) for
> POSIX-conforming shells, and has remained standard to this day. IEEE
> chose not to include emacs mode, so effectively it is emacs mode that
> was treated as obsolete (in 1992).

Nevertheless, that is the one that is most commonly used in *nix systems 
today.