Have you ever found yourself furiously tapping the UP-arrow (or ctrl+p) to find a command that's probably waaaay up there? Would you be surprised if I told you there's a better way? When you want to re-use a command you've written previously, and you know it's not the previous command, or the one before that, your first resort should be a reverse search. This can be accessed with ctrl+r. If you press that button combination, you should see something like this:

(reverse-i-search)`': 

Just start typing the beginning of the command you're looking for, and most often, it will pop up. For example, I sometimes need to re-run the previousgit command that I ran a while back. I then press ctrl+r and type git to get something like this:

(reverse-i-search)`git': git push

Note how the initial git before the : is what I've actually written here, and the text after the : (in this case git push) is what's been found with the reverse search. Pressing tab now will terminate the search and put the result of the search on the command line for editing. Then, simply press enter to execute the command as usual. You can also skip over the editing part and press enter right away to execute the command as-is. Sometimes, however, the result you get first isn't what you want (obviously, just typing git push would have been faster in this case). You can then press ctrl+r again to cycle to the next hit.

(reverse-i-search)`git': git commit -a -m 'Add module docstring to github_api module'

Now there's a command that I might not want to have to type out again in its entirety, better showing why a reverse search may be useful. That's it for this week's TotW, check back next week for more!