New unix stuff! This is, again, stuff I'd searched for forever but never found the right collection of terms. This is what bash readline is REALLY all about. if you make an inputrc file, you can get awesome readline capabilities (similar to ipython). This post at lifehacker showed me how to do it. This site has a more complete description of how to use readline/inputrc. Even better: VI command line editing. There's also something called magic space but I don't know what purpose it serves all the time... it will replace 'magic' characters like !* and !& and !! with whatever command they represent if you hit space immediately after typing them (explained better here). Wow. Awesome.