History, tmux and Editors

Bash saves your commands in ~/.bash_history. Ctrl-R searches it as you type, and sudo !! reruns the last command as root. Ubuntu 225 's HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth drops duplicates and lines that begin with a space, so a leading space keeps a password out of the file. Tab completes names, and with the bash-completion package it completes options, package names and systemctl units too.

A command run over SSH dies with the connection. tmux 49,533 keeps it alive: detach, log out, and reattach later to find the migration still running. Its keys follow a prefix, Ctrl-b by default.

grep '^HIST' ~/.bashrc                       # Ubuntu's history defaults
tmux new-session -d -s deploy 'sleep 600'    # start a session, detached
tmux ls                                      # it runs with no terminal attached
tmux kill-session -t deploy

HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILESIZE=2000
deploy: 1 windows (created Wed Sep 23 13:19:00 2026)

Servers have no graphical editor. nano lists its keys on screen (^ means Ctrl). vim is modal: i enters Insert mode and Esc returns to Normal mode. EDITOR=vim sets what crontab -e and git open. Ubuntu 26.04 ships nano 8.7.1, Vim 9.1 13,171 and tmux 3.6.