Let me teach you about reverse-i-search in bash....

https://linuxvox.com/blog/ctrl-r-linux/

This thread is full of great solutions that I know I will ignore...

Ctrl-R

Try it. Please, I beg you.

I also recommend Atuin, the better shell history that works with most shells and can replace both up arrow and ctrl-r

In addition to ctrl-r, there is also fish! Fish does something similar to Ctrl-R, but in an easier to use way. Start typing a command, and then press the up arrow. It will cycle through your history, but only the history that includes the text you've started typing.

Very useful tip: i have ls aliased to eza which is ls with eyecandy, I have la aliased to eza -a and I have cd aliased to cd && eza which makes navigating folders very easy. I also aliased .. to cd .. for convenience. I know a lot of people are purists about the terminal but i think this is a good ballance between convenience and simplicity. Doesnt do a lot of the cursed stuff ricers like to do.

To be even more efficient while being lazy, try oh-my-bash. You can start typing the beginning of a command and use arrow up to cycle through only those, instead of the whole history. So if you had a very long mount command and don't want to type it again, type mount and up arrow until it can be found. Not very useful for ls -al but very appreciated on longer commands.

Reposted yet again.

As usual, the documentation covers these answers plus much more.

• Bash command line editing covers searching.
• Readline library command line editing covers searching.

history | grep 'ls -la' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*[0-9]\+[[:space:]]*//' | sh

$ sudo apt install sl

Try sl instead of ls, you'll thank me later

I like the retro text adventure charm of running a verbose ls -la after every cd. It's like entering a new room and reading its description for possible exits and items!

ls, ctrl+R

Significantly less up arrows

I just alias ls -lah to lsl.

ls -alh try that. -h means human-readable file sizes

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I'm in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I'm in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

Pro tip, just do:

alias ls="ls -lah"

People talking about history without mentioning the laziest answer is to use an alias, which bash usually has ll = la -la or my personal preference is ll = ls -lAh (list + Everything except . and .. + human readable file size)

is yazi allowed?