I used to waste significant energy trying to edit shell commands at the shell command prompt. Yes, I could use vi mode on readline, but that never quite gave me the same, rich experience. I found it helpful for minor edits, but when someone introduced me to the edit-and-execute command, my entire relationship with command-line tools changed. Once I had the full power of my trusted text editor to compose and edit commands, I stopped valuing GUI clients as highly and I started valuing the scriptability of command-line UIs much more.

Quick Start

If you run bash or zsh or something similar, then you can probably already do this:

1. Search your history for a command. $ history
2. Make a note of the command number—I’m using 1892 as an arbitrary example—then edit that command. $fc 1892

This opens a text editor and lets you edit the command. When you save your changes and exit the editor, then the shell executes that edited command. Be careful! Whatever you do, fc will automatically execute your command immediately after you exit the editor. If you saved your changes, then you’d execute the edited command; if you didn’t save your changes, then you’d execute the original command. More precisely, you’d execute whichever version of the command you most-recently saved before you exited the editor.

Now that you’ve seen how fc runs, you can see a weakness: you need to execute the original command at least once in order to be able to find it in your history in order to be able to edit it with fc. What if you just want to change the command that’s currently drafted on your command prompt? What if you just pressed up a few times to retrieve a recent command and you want to execute something similar, but not quite the same?

Try this.

1. Draft a command on your prompt. Enter the command, but don’t execute it.
2. Press these two keystrokes, one after the other: ctrl+x then ctrl+e. If you want, hold down the control key while you press first x, then e. If this does nothing, then try esc followed by v . (I’ll explain below.)

This opens a text editor and lets you edit the command. When you save your changes and exit the editor, then you’ll see the edited command in your prompt, waiting for you to execute it. Nice!

Tweaks

Which editor does the edit-and-execute command open? You control this by setting the EDITOR environment variable. I have set this to kak, because I love that editor. If you set nothing, you probably get nano.

If you have already set readline to vi mode, then you need to press esc followed by v . This is the vi command that corresponds to the emacs command ctrl+x ctrl+e.

Moreover, if you install the oh-my-zsh plugin vi-mode, then you need to press esc followed by v followed by v again. This avoids collision with esc v, which enters the familiar vi Visual Mode at your command prompt. It took me about a day to get used to typing esc v v to edit commands. Fortunately, I do it so often that training myself to remember the new keystrokes didn’t take long.