One Tip a Week: What's Up McFly?

Are you one of those people that keeps pressing the up arrow in your terminal to get to the command you want? I am too, and sometimes you’re committed to the task even if you press the up arrow 100 times. 😅 

That said, I also use a tool called McFly. I’ve been using it since my days of working at dev.to. I can’t remember if it was my co-worker Dan or Joe who introduced me to this tool, but it’s really great.

Out of the box in shell, you can use CTRL + R to search history. It’s OK.

Enter McFly. It would be disqualified from the Olympics because it’s CTRL + R on steroids.

And for folks on Windows, it even works in Powershell!

Here’s the feature list verbatim from the GitHub repository:

• Rebinds ctrl-r to bring up a full-screen reverse history search prioritized with a small neural network.

• Augments your shell history to track command exit status, timestamp, and execution directory in a SQLite database.

• Maintains your normal shell history file as well so that you can stop using McFly whenever you want.

• Unicode support throughout.

• Includes a simple action to scrub any history item from the McFly database and your shell history files.

• Designed to be extensible for other shells in the future.

• Written in Rust, so it's fast and safe.

• You can type % to match any number of characters when searching.

• Supports Zsh, Bash (version 3+), and PowerShell (version 7+)

Give McFly a try and let me know what you think!

That’s it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!