English has what linguists call deep orthography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth. It has to do with the conservative nature of English spelling. English would rather maintain the same spelling for a word than have it accurately reflect the pronunciation. This makes English much harder to learn than languages with shallow orthography.
This is another reason why Esperanto remains a better international language than English. In Esperanto, each letter has exactly one sound, and there are no exceptions.
"The terminal" is a terminal emulator: just a program that runs a shell. It's easy to learn the MacOS terminal emulator, called Terminal—just read the user guide accessible in the Help menu, under Terminal Help.
But what you really want to learn, I'm guessing, is not just the terminal emulator, but a shell. For that, you'll need to pick a shell and read about it. ZSH is the one that comes standard on MacOS, so you can start with that. ZSH is also just a superset of BASH, so you could learn BASH commands and they'd be mostly applicable to ZSH. Try reading The Linux Command Line: https://www.linuxcommand.org/lc3_learning_the_shell.php.
1-5. Org mode, with plugins org-roam, org-roam-bibtex, org-noter, and org-citar. Every book I read has an accompanying bibtex file, and a linked note in org-roam. Usually it's an ebook, in which case there's an accompanying PDF as well. Org-roam keeps the book note linked to my other concept notes, org-roam-bibtex and org-citar help keep it connected to the bibtex data, and org-noter keeps my page-level annotations aligned with the page where I'm taking the notes.
2. Org-capture. When I'm on a web page, or in a code editor, or a PDF, I run org-capture and it stores a link to that URL, code location, or PDF page.
3. Very often. 4. Same: org and org-roam. 5. I guess syncing between devices is the thing I find most challenging, but it's not that big of a deal.
There's a sense in which this is endemic to Paris: as a city which evolved from a medieval one, with narrow ad-hoc streets snaking all around, it lends itself uniquely to wandering, in a way that New York City, for instance, with its grid system of numbered streets, could not. Walk a straight line in Paris, and you're likely to end up where you started, because of the way the streets curve and intersect. Walk a straight line in New York, and you'll just end up in New Jersey, in some parking lot, questioning all the life choices you made that led to that moment.
> and you'll just end up in New Jersey, in some parking lot, questioning all the life choices
It might have not been intended, but I find this passage quite poetic, and of course full of some sense of... Melancoly, perhaps. Thanks for writing it.
Hmmm... Many parts of the old Paris have been entirely destroyed to make way for gigantic streets / boulevards of Hausmann.
I went to Paris quite some times and although there are places with narrow streets, Paris doesn't strike me as a city made of tiny streets where you can easily get lost.
It's not as cookie cutter as N.Y. or L.A. but Paris is an artificial city too:
otoh New York's grid system of numbered streets is an encouragement to wander who knows where with some confidence that you can shortcut and backtrack.
But if you have autocomplete suggestions enabled in your modern shell (Zsh, Fish, Nushell), you don't even have to press C-r. Just type and it'll complete for you.
Even ignoring that those might not be built-in (at least for zsh), I can't imagine this matching unique part in the middle of a command from history without explicit action (that would be terrible UX).
And when you have multiple similar commands in your history that only differ somewhere in the middle, you don't want completion, you want searching.
For those cases you can type until it autocompletes one of those commands, then press the up arrow key to cycle through the variations of that match. I don't know about zsh, but it's the default for fish and nushell.
I can simply do "C-r pip" to get to the first and "C-r npm" to get to the second (or cycle through any other matches, or if I frequently had a few, maybe do "C-r tool npm"): your suggestion sounds much worse in comparison.
This is another reason why Esperanto remains a better international language than English. In Esperanto, each letter has exactly one sound, and there are no exceptions.