One thing I've never been able to get iTerm to do that every other iTerm user seems to have setup almost automatically is how it ghosts the full completion of a command you are typing (faded behind your live typing), presumably from your history, and then you can just tab to complete the whole thing. So many commands are repeated often and I've never been able to get mine to do this very basic feature.
You are probably referring to fish shell which has this feature (https://fishshell.com/).
However, I find that zsh + ohmyzsh works just as well. After typing the beginning of a command you can use the arrow keys to cycle through all commands in the history with the same beginning.
A third method for efficient history search is ctrl+r. Just press ctr+r and start typing part of the command. Then you press enter to execute or ctr+r to cycle through the history.
fish is nice but I've ran into too many issues where some weird shell command / script I find online is expecting to be in bash and I have to switch out of fish, so its hard for me to switch.
It works at least for nvm (caveat: Installed from nvm directly, not homebrew), and my company's ssh setup script, which are the two reasons I've had cause to use it.
It's worth getting used to your new discovery a bit first (C-r is isearch-backward), partly because it's useful in other places, too – for example ipython or any decent programming language shell has emacs-derived keybindings including isearch via readline or a clone.
You're talking about autosuggestion, one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE features. I tell everyone about this:
If you're nervous about running shell commands here they're the same as the installation on the site if you care to check:
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
Then edit your ~/.zshrc plugins
# Plugins
plugins=(zsh-autosuggestions)
Then restart and type some commands. re-type a command you did and push control+e to complete it. I recommend re-binding your caps lock key to control for vim and also tons of hotkey ease of use. then you can just use caps+e for instant fast typing.
Combine this with using control+p to cycle through previous commands means you can be a wizard at commands quickly
oh-my-zsh has more than six hundred open pull requests, and can be considered unmaintained. It is perfectly usable in most respects, and I would not expect that to change in the near future. However, some competing projects have started because of that, and may be worth consideration.
People should realize terminal and scripting don't need to be done using same shell.
I use fish for scripting but run zsh for terminal. (fish had couple weirdness in day to day terminal use and zsh could do pretty much all fish could do with zplug.)
not my choice. certainly less people suffer bash in the BSD world.
while bashims may give additional features, readability and portability suffers. I much prefer scripts using a posixish #!/bin/sh and a strict subset of shell syntax. something like pdfx.
