Whenever you got a new machine, it means endless porting configurations, compilation of codes and installation of packages to let it be usable for you.

Recently, I got access to a new supercomputer for a limited amount of time, so I start using it without much configuration. Soon I found myself missing the convenience of auto-completion and auto-suggestion of my shell, which I got really used to in any other machines I used.

What shell auto-completion and auto-suggestion do is to remember your commands and give you suggestions when you type in the first few letters of a command. When you find yourself typing the same commands over and over again (such as ssh to a specific server), you'll find it really useful.

This is how the suggestions will look like (I'm using zsh-autosuggestions here):

So this article is mainly about giving recommendations for both zsh and bash users on how to let the shell to remember your commands.

1. zsh-autosuggestions for zsh

On my mac, zsh is the default shell,

The plugin zsh-autosuggestions is the one I want to recommend here. As the name suggests, it gives you suggestions for commands when you type in a zsh shell, and you can simple press the right arrow key to accept the suggestion.

To install it, you can follow the instructions on their github repo. You can use Antigen, Oh My Zsh, Homebrew or manually install it.

I use oh-my-zsh for managing my zsh configuration. Actually I adopt a minimal configuration of oh-my-zsh, which is just 2 plugins. These are the lines to configure oh-my-zsh in my ~/.zshrc:

bash export ZSH="$HOME/.oh-my-zsh" ZSH_THEME="alanpeabody" plugins=(git zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-autosuggestions) source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh As you can see to install zsh-autosuggestions you just need to add it to the plugins list, separated by a space, tab, or newline.

There are definitely more to explore in oh-my-zsh, but I'm not going to talk about them in detail here.

If you're interested in more configurations, you can check out the official website or their github repo.

(PS. I also recommend pure as a beautiful and minimal ZSH prompt theme, and it is developed and maintained by my favorite open source and mac apps developer Sindre Sorhus.)

2. ble.sh for bash

For some linux machines, bash is default shell. If you are using bash, I would recommend ble.sh.

I was looking for a way to let my bash shell to remember my commands, and I found there is a oh-my-bash for managing your bash configuration, but I couldn't find a easy-to-use auto-suggestion plugin that can be easily installed via oh-my-bash.

Then I found ble.sh, you can try it first without installation.

```bash

TRIAL without installation

git clone --recursive --depth 1 --shallow-submodules https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh.git make -C ble.sh source ble.sh/out/ble.sh `` Then try typing in a few commands, you'll find it achives the same functionality aszsh-autosuggestions`, it also give suggestions for commands that you never used before.

If you like it, you can quickly install it via running the following command:

```bash

Quick INSTALL to BASHRC

git clone --recursive --depth 1 --shallow-submodules https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh.git make -C ble.sh install PREFIX=~/.local echo 'source ~/.local/share/blesh/ble.sh' >> ~/.bashrc ```

I hope some of you will find this article useful, and I'm also looking forward to hearing your recommendations on other useful plugins or your configurations for your shell.