Let me teach you about reverse-i-search in bash....

https://linuxvox.com/blog/ctrl-r-linux/

This thread is full of great solutions that I know I will ignore...

Ctrl-R

Try it. Please, I beg you.

I also recommend Atuin, the better shell history that works with most shells and can replace both up arrow and ctrl-r

In addition to ctrl-r, there is also fish! Fish does something similar to Ctrl-R, but in an easier to use way. Start typing a command, and then press the up arrow. It will cycle through your history, but only the history that includes the text you've started typing.

To be even more efficient while being lazy, try oh-my-bash. You can start typing the beginning of a command and use arrow up to cycle through only those, instead of the whole history. So if you had a very long mount command and don't want to type it again, type mount and up arrow until it can be found. Not very useful for ls -al but very appreciated on longer commands.

Very useful tip: i have ls aliased to eza which is ls with eyecandy, I have la aliased to eza -a and I have cd aliased to cd && eza which makes navigating folders very easy. I also aliased .. to cd .. for convenience. I know a lot of people are purists about the terminal but i think this is a good ballance between convenience and simplicity. Doesnt do a lot of the cursed stuff ricers like to do.

$ sudo apt install sl

Try sl instead of ls, you'll thank me later

Reposted yet again.

As usual, the documentation covers these answers plus much more.

• Bash command line editing covers searching.
• Readline library command line editing covers searching.

history | grep 'ls -la' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*[0-9]\+[[:space:]]*//' | sh

I like the retro text adventure charm of running a verbose ls -la after every cd. It's like entering a new room and reading its description for possible exits and items!

ls, ctrl+R

Significantly less up arrows

ls -alh try that. -h means human-readable file sizes

I just alias ls -lah to lsl.

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I'm in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I'm in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

Pro tip, just do:

alias ls="ls -lah"

People talking about history without mentioning the laziest answer is to use an alias, which bash usually has ll = la -la or my personal preference is ll = ls -lAh (list + Everything except . and .. + human readable file size)

is yazi allowed?