I use the shell since forever, and yet I keep learning
new things. Ironically, being very familiar with a
tool seems to be the perfect recipe for not knowing it
deeply.
A thing that typically happens, in my case, is to
systematically work around minor annoying software
behaviours, without even trying to understand if
there's an 'official' way to get rid of said
annoyances.
Take less(1), for example: searching for a term results
by default in such term being highlighted. This is a
very useful feature, until you're satisfied with the
search results, and you want to turn highlighting off.
Official way: ESC-u Stupid workaround: search for
something else, hoping not to find any result.
In my case, I tend to use the stupid workaround,
because the official way is not wired in my muscolar
memory. Specifically I tend to search /noh,
simply because :noh is how you disable search
highlights in vim, and that is in my muscolar memory.
Yesterday I realised how stupid it is to use the
work-around for something that *must* be a feature, and
that's why I looked into the manual. I found about
ESC-u, and about more useful features I didn't know.
For example ^K (keep position) or ^R (no regex,
faster!).
There is always some hidden pearl in the user manuals!
