As you noted, avoiding arcane magical characters is a primary design goal for Fish. But the alternative you mention — using the cursor keys — is indeed cumbersome and not at all what Fish users would normally do. In my case, I added a "sdl" command (for "sudo last") as a plugin for my Tacklebox and Tackle projects:

https://github.com/justinmayer/tacklebox

https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle/blob/master/plugins/sd...

Some may feel that these kinds of functions should be built-in, and if so, that's probably where the philosophical divide lies. For me and many others, avoiding esoteric syntax makes it easy to compose small snippets that accomplish precisely what we want, without having to remember unintuitive special characters or deal with their often-idiosyncratic behavior. (^_^)