From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200011092152.VAA00381@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Perl5 & kenji arisawa's perl question 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 09 Nov 2000 16:51:56 GMT."
             <973787527.26907.0.nnrp-01.d4f0e306@news.demon.co.uk> 
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From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu,  9 Nov 2000 21:52:29 +0000
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> I don't believe it's easier to find a command in an acme window and
> then flaff around with mouse button 2 to execute it (trying not to
> accidentally execute half of the next line, too!)  than it is to hit
> the cursor-up key in old fashioned shells like tcsh.

I'd agree with that, but that only goes so far - the last few commands
are great, but then you start getting less return as you have to
linearly and manually search back through time.

Once you get into actually searching for things, then you're past the
simple up-arrow idea, and it's time to revisit. ye olde "=p pattern"
works well on a system that saves over time, and allows you to edit
the results before executing.

In addition to being "forever", the old rc history file was also
shareable across shells. With plan 9, it's shared across everything,
if you want. This may be good or bad, depending on your opinion
(and probably your mood).

> It's not a
> question of tyranny of the old ways, rather it's a question of ease of
> use, sometimes at the end of a hard day, and the number of muscles you
> need to use to perform a common operation.

I can't help but feel you can work around this, if you want. The great
thing about setting a prompt to whatever you want is that the prompt
can be your most commonly-executed command, if it helps. Having a
prompt like:

hist ;

could show your last ten commands immediately, ready for re-execution.

steve