^r, remembering

I enjoyed this article on Small Programming Tricks. It mentions using Ctrl + r to search backwards in shell history. (There are a lot of other useful Readline commands to learn.)

I remember learning about Ctrl + r. I was sitting in the cubicles for the Spelling team in Building 43. This was soon after I had joined them as a software engineer, part time, while still officially on the Search Quality Analyst team.

I had asked to do a 20% project with them, having grown to admire their team through working with them as an analyst. The manager for the team, Yew Jin, told me I would instead need to give them at least 50% of my time, and that I would need to sit with them. I was happy about that though also a bit intimidated.

I was entering some commands on the commandline with Yew Jin standing behind me observing. He noticed I was retyping something, and said, “Watch this!”, demonstrating Ctrl + r. I remember being happy to learn it.

I’m feeling grateful now thinking back on this. Thank you, Yew Jin, for this bit of knowledge and so much more.