OT: Re: Windows vs Linux [was: p2exe using wine/cxoffice]

[Jeremy Jones]

Tim Golden wrote:
<snip>

>As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
>I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use, 
>including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of 
>me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a 
>previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards
>
>with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
>*then* 
>you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which followed it. 
>If someone can tell me how to do this with bash/readline I will be 
>indebted to them and it will increase my chances of switching to Linux 
>a bit!
>

Others have recommended ctrl-r in bash.  People's tastes vary, but that 
has an awkward feel for me.  In zsh, you just type in as many letters as 
you care to match and hit the "up" arrow.  But, honestly, this is a bit 
annoying to me.  If I've begun to type in a command, realize it's not 
what I want, but instead, I want to go back in my history a couple of 
commands, I hit the "up" arrow to find to my irritation that it's 
pattern matching rather than going directly back in my history.  I guess 
it comes in handy at times, though....

- jmj