[PLUG] Saving terminal commands

[Michael M. Moore]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:10 AM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm more a GUI kinda guy, but there are certain commands that I use
> repeatedly in the terminal. For example, I use cdparanoia and lame to
> rip and encode CDs from my collection. But sometimes I don't use those
> commands for several months. I have the commands saved in an OOo Writer
> document, and I can use the arrow keys to go back in the terminal
> window, but there must be a faster way. After several months of not
> using a command the arrow keys require 40-50 strokes to get back to the
> command I want. And launching OOo and copying and pasting from it into
> the terminal is also time consuming.

One command-line app I run frequently is wget, but I always want one
or more of several different options, depending upon what I'm going to
use it to download and when.  It got tedious looking up the various
options in the man page and it got tedious typing out different logins
I sometimes need, so I put those I use most often in a text file.
Whenever I'm going to use wget, I first 'cat' my text file, then just
highlight the particular argument(s) I want at the moment and paste
them (with a middle-click) into the command.  Definitely not as
efficient as writing a script or making an alias for wget, but in this
case I would need multiple scripts or multiple aliases to accomplish
what I want to accomplish.  I think of it as a sort of edited man
page, or cheat sheet -- i.e, here are the options that are important
to me.

It's much the same as what you're doing now, except OO.org complicates
the process, because you can't 'cat' an OO.org document.  Text files
are much more flexible -- you can read and edit them on the console,
in a terminal, in a GUI text editor, or in a word processor.

I use a small script for converting *.wav to *.mp3 with lame.  Since I
always use the same options, it's faster that way.

> I note that the Gnome terminal allows me to open new tabs, and I do
> that a lot when working on something. It would be really nice if I
> could save a tab that has the specific commands for a particular
> activity. Maybe there is a better terminal than the Gnome terminal?
> Maybe there are some other commands besides the arrows that I could
> use? I'm looking for suggestions.

URxvt (also called rxvt-unicode) is nice.  It has a perl extension
that enables tabs, and it has pseudo-transparency, like GNOME
terminal, so it's pretty; and it supports 88 colors.  It also seems a
bit faster than GNOME terminal.  Various bits and pieces of GNOME have
been giving me problems lately, so I'm using it less and less.

Michael M.

-- 
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within
limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add
'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's
will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
--Thomas Jefferson