I am working on learning R. For those that don’t know, R is a programming language and program a bit similar to Matlab, but is particularly designed for statistics. It is free and open source, and pretty fast and flexible. It has a pretty nice library interface, with lots of user contributed libraries at CRAN (The comprehensive R archive network — modeled after CTAN and CPAN (Tex and Perl respectively)).

On *nix systems, R uses the readline library to give a command history. So I can simply type the up arrow, and find the last command I used. I just discovered that it can also search the command history in the same way as in my BASH shell. Since I like vi, I use vi key bindings in bash. I was pleasantly surprised when R automatically used these as well. I am not sure if it gets them from my .bashrc file or my .inputrc file, since I have vi keymaps set in both.
.bashrc:


set -o vi


.inputrc


set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi


So when I am using R, I can search the history for “foo” by typing:
<esc> /foo

and then use ‘n’ and ‘N’ to go to the next or previous match.

What fun!!