What's your most-used terminal trick nobody taught you?

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Some of the best command-line habits aren’t from tutorials or docs. They’re weird little things you stumbled into or accidentally discovered while trying not to break something in production.

Whether it’s a clever alias, a one-liner you’ve used a hundred times, or a keybind that changed your life, drop your go-to terminal trick below.

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For me, it’s ctrl+r for reverse search in bash. I used to just hit the up arrow like 50 times trying to find that one command I ran earlier. :smile: Once I discovered reverse search I couldn’t believe I’d gone so long without it. Just hit ctrl+r and start typing any part of the command and it pulls it right up.

Close second would be !! to repeat the last command. Mostly because of sudo !! when you forget to run something as root.

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If you just created a directory or moved a file and now want to interact with that same file/path, don’t type it out again. Use Alt +

  1. mkdir /var/www/html/my_new_project
  2. Type cd and then hit Alt +
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Been using the screen utility for years until tmux started to be included in distros instead.

With some use and research found the best way to make the session ‘reentrant’ to survive disconnections was to write a little script, viz.:

[…]
#!/usr/bin/bash

tmux start-server

#create a session with four windows
tmux new-session -d -AD -s 0 -n BTop btop
tmux new-window -t 0:1 -n “Midnight Commander” mc
tmux new-window -t 0:2 -n “Default Shell”
tmux new-window -t 0:3 -n “Shell” ‘duf; bash’
#tmux new-window -t 0:4 -n …

tmux attach -t0
[…]

So, each time I reconnect ssh it pickups up current session or creates new with prepopulated windows ready to go.

;-}
P

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Hey @nobillgates

That’s a solid approach! I made a similar switch from screen to tmux a while back and never looked back. The ability to script your session layout like that is hard to beat.

Do you have it wired up to run automatically on SSH login?

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I did consider full automation from login but decided against for the sake of flexibility.

I fire up a lot of test VMs for assorted distros and this is one of the scripts I always include in the setup. Always a good start.

:face_with_monocle::+1:t4:

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What terminal are you using? I get a list of the directories in the current directory with this.

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(LXTerminal) One I recently started making use of is CTRL-W for deleting a word to the left.

Otherwise, mostly CTRL-SHIFT-T for new terminal tab, CTRL-SHIFT-W to close terminal, and ALT-1 to ALT-9 to switch between them, similar to the browser.

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most-used terminal trick nobody taught you

A hard and restrictive condition indeed!
That was <ctrl>-d to close sudo or terminal session.

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Wow, this one !! Never knew this one. That will come in handy !
Brilliant :+1:

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Great tips :slight_smile:

I often use ctrl + l (lowercase L) to clear the screen. It’s the same as running the clear command, with the difference that ctrl + l still lets you “scroll back” (so it doesn’t delete the scrollback buffer), so you can see the commands and outputs that happened before pressing ctrl + l

There are other ones but I’m guessing the cd - command is rather useful to switch “back and forth” between two directories. Here’s an example:

ricmarques@mypc:~$ cd /boot/grub/
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ 
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ ls -l
total 2404
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 dez  5  2022 fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     712 fev  8  2025 gfxblacklist.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root    8731 abr 17 23:56 grub.cfg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root    1024 abr 18  2026 grubenv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 mai  4  2025 locale
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2411806 mai 24  2025 unicode.pf2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   20480 mai  4  2025 x86_64-efi
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ 

ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ cd /etc/default/grub.d/
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$ ls -l
total 0
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$ cd -
/boot/grub
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ cd -
/etc/default/grub.d
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$
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