A couple of weeks ago, bm sounded like a good idea. This week, co sounds like a good one too. Where bm allows you to stash bookmarks and cue them quickly, co helps you build a database of particularly obtuse commands, tag them, annotate them, search them, filter them, and then recall them with only a few keypresses.
If co looks like a re-imagining of bash’s history tool, that’s understandable. A few important distinctions though:
- co doesn’t stash any commands until you tell it to, and then it only grabs the last thing you entered.
- When you tell it to save a command, you can add as many tags as you like, and a short “message” to remind you of the keyboard sorcery you performed.
- Once saved, you can list out the commands you saved, or filter that list by tag.
- You can perform a command again through co, by using its index number.
So instead of simply keeping a history of commands, co allows you to organize and manage the most useful ones.
As you can see above, it’s particularly helpful for long, complex commands that might otherwise require a lot of re-research to use again. co also has a rudimentary “interactive” mode, which allows you to step through your collection one line at a time, and even edit it on the fly.
One small note: There may come an odd situation where you ask co to save a command while you’re using more than one terminal. It’s possible (and I know it is, because it happened to me) that co will grab a command that was executed in another terminal, and save it instead of the one you just entered locally. Just so you know. 😐
co uses sqlite and ruby, and is not in Arch or Debian that I could find. I used gem install co in Arch to add it to my ~/.gems path; I’m sure one of you clever Internet heroes out there can build it properly for either of those distros, if you like it enough.
I really like co because it solves a dilemma for me: I hate programs that keep histories, but I do invent a lot of convoluted commands for esoteric situations.
co allows me to faithfully eradicate bash’s history at regular intervals, but still keep the command I use to generate sample text files filled with random words. 😕 Hey, that’s important stuff. 🙂
Inconsolation 