Tips for customising your shell

When you first log into your VM, your profile will essentially be a clean slate. Below are some tips to get your bash profile off the ground.

~/.vimrc

Create the ~/.vimrc file and add the following lines to it:

set nocompatible
set belloff=all
set backspace=indent,eol,start

Terminal Colors

Uncomment line 46 in your ~/.bashrc file:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
#force_color_prompt=yes

Should look like:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
force_color_prompt=yes

Optimise history search

As it stands, using the up arrow and down arrow keys will cycle through the latest commands in your history:

You can optomise your search history to return commands using a string as a REGEX pattern - see the example below cycling through old commands that begin with wc:

1. Create the ~/.inputrc file and include the contents:

#Page up/page down
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward

$include /etc/inputrc

2. Include the following in your ~/.bashrc file:

## advanced history search
export INPUTRC=$HOME/.inputrc

3. Source both your ~/.bashrc and ~/.inputrc file:

source ~/.bashrc
bind -f ~/.inputrc

Aliases

Shortcut commands are useful, particularly for tricky commands like tar. Save them as aliases.

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

alias l="ls -lhg --color=auto"
alias la="ls -la --color=auto"
alias lt="ls -lcth --color=auto"
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias tarzip="tar -cvzf"
alias tarunzip="tar -xvzf"
alias grep="grep --color=auto"
alias vbrc="vi ~/.bashrc"
alias sbrc="source ~/.bashrc"