Not much, really. Yet somehow those little things add up to something... faster :) Basically "just":
- not having to append `| head -n $ROWS` or something similar on every command (yet having the view as-if-you-typed-it, but at the same time being able to scroll down further through the results; and having them visible as you continue tweaking, unlike `less` which you have to quit to tweak the pipeline),
- not having to press up-arrow-key, then alt-b / alt-f to a position in the pipeline you want to tweak after every Enter (e.g. just before the `| head...`, but sometimes a bit more back),
- sometimes also not having to dump the initial input from a command into a file, and to wait until it's finished, but being able to immediately start filtering even while the input is still being generated.
Once I just had those ideas, I felt pain every time I repeated the dance, enough that it made me push on up even when I was super tired of working on it. The pain of not having it when I know it could exist was even bigger.
- not having to append `| head -n $ROWS` or something similar on every command (yet having the view as-if-you-typed-it, but at the same time being able to scroll down further through the results; and having them visible as you continue tweaking, unlike `less` which you have to quit to tweak the pipeline),
- not having to press up-arrow-key, then alt-b / alt-f to a position in the pipeline you want to tweak after every Enter (e.g. just before the `| head...`, but sometimes a bit more back),
- sometimes also not having to dump the initial input from a command into a file, and to wait until it's finished, but being able to immediately start filtering even while the input is still being generated.
Once I just had those ideas, I felt pain every time I repeated the dance, enough that it made me push on up even when I was super tired of working on it. The pain of not having it when I know it could exist was even bigger.