@b0rk accidentally hitting tab to autocomplete on an empty command line will lock up my terminal for 30 seconds before saying "I found a thousand commands, do you want to see them?" No! If I can't get an autocomplete in a couple seconds, please stop!

(This is mostly an issue on Windows bash because the thing that searches the file system is very slow.)

@b0rk Missing history when I have multiple tabs open.

Some commands I ran yesterday don't appear to be anywhere!

@b0rk problem with history: commands are not in my history anymore (I now got an archive for that).

pasting a command that had more than one line (although it looked like a one-liner) and then having executed multiple commands.

Using single-quotes in large strings that I want single-quoted (I got a solution for this one too).

Figuring out variable expansion (filled, empty, unset).

@b0rk

Annoyances
* Tedium of combining stdout and stderr (easy)
* Redirect output and replace source (easy — cf. Sponge)
* Mixed CLI argument format disciplines (e.g., diversity of dd, find, GNU-style, subcommands, etc)
* History gets lost between sessions
* Absence of manual pages
* Diversity of ways of getting help (e.g., -h, --help, help, etc).
* Idiosyncrasies of Bourne shell language

Difficult
* Parsing and structuring unstructured input (cf. PowerShell or Elvish Shell)

Bad UX
* Screen

@b0rk Today I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why my script's output was always starting with an empty line.

Turns out I accidentally held Alt while pressing enter, forgot, and thus my prompt included a newline by itself. And as an avid user of Ctrl-R, I kept using that same input...

@b0rk Having multiple lines of unrelated text in my clipboard, and accidentally pasting all of it in, perhaps by right-clicking. The result being that the terminal tries to run hundreds of lines of garbage.

(In Unix terminals, Ctrl+U, Crtl+K can clear the preceding and proceeding text respectively. That can help recover.)

@b0rk Besides the mistake-on-single-line thing:
• Shell/terminal combos pretending not to understand any control characters.
• Remote sessions that don‘t let me just locally select and copy any text, because the remote terminal actually likes mice and instead comes up with a remote selection inside the remote fullscreen editor.

Yes you can configure that, but you need to do it … 😉

@b0rk

> entering commands at a shell prompt in the terminal
> love more specific, love examples

> so far I have
> copy/paste issues
> problems with history?

Ugh. Ctrl+R searches one too far, and then Ctrl+S doesn't work, because I forgot to set up with: stty -ixon
or because something cancelled my: stty -ixon

And Ctrl+S actually meaning XOff to force you to try Ctrl+Q trips people up, I see that repeatedly

> having to press the left arrow 100 times

YES

So very much of 'set -o emacs' works, but the simple M-z zap-to-char doesn't work, despite Emacs defining it same as the Vi df of 'set -o vi'

> autocomplete not working

YES

Like the Shell feels it knows better than I do whether I want Tab to search my Sh $PATH or my Sh $PWD, and for only 'chmod +x' Files or for all Files. And it's so often way wrong

> autocomplete not working

Zsh Tab flatly refuses to try if you're in the middle of a word

Like macOS Bash asked to Tab after "byo" inside: echo ~/Public/byo/bin/vim.py
will autocomplete happy happy to: echo ~/Public/byoverbs/bin/vim.py

But Zsh fails this test. it just beeps at you

> > beeps

They all beep too eagerly, too often, too loud, too long. Sh & Emacs & Vi suffer deeply from this dis'accomodating design fault. I frequently turn on the Terminal Visual Beep & mute my laptop just to shut them up

@b0rk Normally, I can bite the bullet and push → however many times I need to. But I was working with the MySQL prompt the other day, and it didn't let me go back to previous lines at all! So, my current vote is multi-line editing.

My second vote is for tab-completion of local files; sometimes a program's autocomplete decides that, maybe because I have a file ignored by git(?), I don't want to complete it… but I do! Thankfully, my shell usually autosuggests the file, but… still frustrating.

@b0rk lately: terminal emulators using the key combination that the shell has always interpreted as "move cursor forward one word" as "search". This leads to having to press arrow keys 100s of times to do a simple edit.

Worst, though: repeating a command that includes the filename twice, for different files. I can never remember how to "do again but replace all occurrences of 102 by 106".

@b0rk if you begin to type a comand, but you need to run a comand bevor that, so you Ctrl+c the first command and end up writing the first one two times. Not really a problem but really annoying.

And for the auto complete issue: cmds that you can't run with your permissions won't be autocompletet (typing the cmd first and then Ctrl+a write sudo before it). And on some PCs writing a cmd behind sudo has no autocompletion.