I recently threw caution to the wind and changed my shell over to vi mode. I wanted to take advantage of the superior command editing ability that this mode offered, and also to continue to bake vi[m] methods into every aspect of my working environment.

The change has been relatively straightforward; the only issues I have experienced are really just around a couple of keybinds that I had become accustomed to in normal/Emacs mode:

• Alt.: to recall the last argument of the previous command(s)
• Ctrll: to clear the screen in insert mode

The first, the ability to recall the final arguments of previous commands was a showstopper for me: I really struggled without this. Being able to recall a long file path and append it to a new command is invaluable. Fortunately, there is the yank-last-arg command that does exactly this. Why it is not bound by default in vi mode is beyond me…

The other was purely cosmetic, really. I am an inveterate clearer of the screen—unless I am referring to something printed to stdout, I always prefer to work at the top of the console.

In any event, with the bindable readline commands, it was a trivial exercize to restore this functionality to my bash shell in vi mode. I created $HOME/.inputrc, and added the requisite binds:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

$include /etc/inputrc

# for vi mode
set editing-mode vi
$if mode=vi

set keymap vi-command
# these are for vi-command mode
"\e[A": history-search-backward            # arrow up
"\e[B": history-search-forward             # arrow down
"\ep": yank-last-arg                       # bind to Alt-p
Control-l: clear-screen

set keymap vi-insert
# these are for vi-insert mode
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\ep": yank-last-arg
Control-l: clear-screen
$endif

There is an extensive list of readline commands and variables with which you can customize your shell environment.