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Comment by spinningarrow | Hacker News Reader

I started with bash, moved on to zsh and finally settled on fish. Besides fish being super user-friendly out of the box, I couldn’t find a zsh plugin that emulated its history search abilities.

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I use the following lines in my .bashrc to search the history based on a half-typed command (taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030182/how-do-i-change-...):

    if [[ $- == *i* ]]
    then
        bind '"\e[A": history-search-backward'
        bind '"\e[B": history-search-forward'
    fi

There are two history search features in fish that I really like: One is searching for a half typed command as above, but the other one that I haven’t found elsewhere is completing words from other commands. For example, I can type ‘touch something’ and later on do ‘cat some’ and then press option+up and fish will complete it to ‘something’.

After using ZSH I have that first feature and love it. I try to keep as much of my history as possible and it's amazing how much time you can save that way. Does that second feature not clutter up that history though?

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