Just found out from this short video by Web Dev with Matt that you can edit your current command in your editor easily by hitting Ctrl + X followed by Ctrl + E.

For example, let’s say that my shell looks like this:

$ ps -ef | grep 'sleep' | grep -v grep | awk ' {print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Editing that sleep there would take quite a few more keystrokes in the shell than in your editor.

Hitting the above keys will open your default editor (check echo $EDITOR to see which is it) with the command. Save it, close it and your edits will be available in your shell.

There are many times when we have a long unwieldy command that we would like to edit somewhere in the middle, or reword part of it. For example, this helps a lot when copying requests from the browser using the Copy as cURL command and then further editing the request parameters before sending. This helps you quickly change what you want to do, all in the comfort of your editor.