Editing bash command in vim

You can open the current command you are typing for editing in your default text editor by pressing Ctrl + x + e. It will be executed after you write and quit the file. This is perfect for editing long/multi-line commands where typos are likely to occur. Consider something like this:

for run in {1..10}
do
    echo "Print me ten times"
done

Editing this in vim is much more satisfying, isn’t it?

You can also open the last executed command for editing if you execute the fc command. You can also edit the last command starting with a certain pattern using fc [pattern] (you can skip the editor and execute the output of fc by adding the -s option, and a useful tip is to have alias r="fc -s", which would allow you to execute the last command starting with “cc” by running r cc).

P.S: In order for this trick to open vim and not any other editor, make sure you have the line EDITOR=vim in your ~/.bashrc. Obviously this works with any text editor.