Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!pds
From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: suggestion for next release of shell
Message-ID: <914@sandino.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Apr 88 19:23:58 GMT
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 22

I had an idea for a future version of Matt/Steve's shell.  If the first
character typed on the command line is a !, and the second is not a !
or a number, immediately search back for the first line that begins
with that second character and replace the type-in with it, just as the
up and down arrows do.  Then if the next character typed is not the
same as the next character in the current type-in line, then search back
for the first line that matches both, and so on.  This is an
emacs-style incremental search backwards.  If the user types delete,
you would have to go back to the previous state.  Return would execute
the command.  Typing a character that doesn't match anything in the
history should probably just beep at you or something, and not accept
the character.

The beauty of this is that the keystrokes typed to reexecute a command
would be the same as for csh, but this would be strictly more powerful,
since you immediately know when you've found the command you want to
redo.  Also, you could edit the command.  This would be MUCH easier
than using csh's !xxx:s/old/new/ form, or even the ^old^new form.
-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds