Another Bash Tip

I just learned yet another goodie about the Bash shell that I must share with you. This trick made my day on so many levels.

You know how annoying it is when you get those ridiculously long commands in a terminal window? You know how much more annoying it is when you generally can't Ctrl+arrow around the command to change bits and pieces when you're on OSX? If you've ever been in that boat, this tip is for you.

Bash allows you to hit Ctrl+x Ctrl+e to edit your current command in your "preferred" editor. Your "preferred" editor is determined from the EDITOR environment variable. Since I'm a fan of VIM, all I need to do is make sure I've got export EDITOR=vim in my .bashrc or something along those lines. Once I do that, I can hit Ctrl+x Ctrl+e anytime I am using Bash and have a smelly, long command I want to manipulate.

See it in action.