with grep I see all the alternatives, Ctl+R just shows me one

Why not just use an alias?

Brilliant

Some would call the former command cat abuse.

In short, unless you want the contents of a file printed to stdout (or multiple files concatenated), the command can probably be written without cat, instead using the filename as an argument (grep pattern file) or IO redirection (cmd < file).

Stylistics and readability are another thing though.

Just checking, because I learnt to type before I worked this out, and because surely someone reading doesn't know: press tab. Bash will fill in file names from your current directory.

E.g. say you have files fred1file, fred2file, jim.

Type f then press tab, it will fill to "fred". Then press 2 and press tab again and it will fill the full "fred2file".

Have a play, it works in heaps of situations.

Congratulations! I remember where I was when I first learned it (in a noisy server room at the back of a machine shop).

Now pair it with FZF for fuzzy finding -- it's surprisingly easy to set up, just following any guide. It's insanely useful. I find myself even doing things like typing:

$ xinput --disable $(xinput --list | grep -i touchpad | grep 'id=[0-9]\+' -o | cut -d= -f2)  # Disable synaptic touchpad trackpad pointer

commands with these like comments on the ends as sort of "tags" so I can ctrl+r search for them later. Yes, I know I could just use a named function, but this is like the step just before that--before I know if I'll be issuing the same command all the time, or just for the next couple weeks. (This one was from when I was resting my notebook on my laptop.)

Shit is usually a pain in the ass. The challenge is divining how much of a pain in the ass something has to be that someone else might have made a solution for it.

I didn't know you could ctrl+shift+c to copy in the terminal until a month ago when my linux n00b wife said "there has to be a better way to do this. I've been right clicking to copy for 10 years.