A shortcut to edit long shell commands in your $EDITOR (#tilPost)

If you're wrangling long shell commands, you know that tweaking parameters can be a bit of a pain. Especially when your command spans multiple lines and includes line breaks, you must be careful not to lose your changes. Press one key too much, and you're shuffling through your shell history and your current changes will be gone.

But today I learned that there's hope. If you want to edit an already typed command in your favorite editor, you can press ctrl + x followed by ctrl + e.

This combination triggers the so-called edit-and-execute-command, which then creates a temporary file, opens it in the editor defined in your shell's $EDITOR variable, and when you save and close this file — your terminal command will be updated. Pretty magical!