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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

I love their tagline. Very funny. I used it for a while and liked it enough but their development strategy is explicitly against having configurable options. A few things nagged me and there was no way to change the behavior so I switched to zsh and made it work like fish, but the way I like it instead. For me this was a good decision and I recommend it. (I am not a fan of oh-my-zsh or plugin managers etc either)

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can you elaborate on what nagged you? i am just curious, not critical.

i use fish, zsh and now also elvish. the main thing for me is autosuggestion and getting history with uparrow. zsh has a module for autosuggestion. elvish has uparrow history (but only matches at the start). so fish still wins over the others. elvish comes second because typing a command and hitting uparrow once is almost like autosuggestion. but i could not find a way to get that in zsh. i also prefer the way fish and elvish handle blocks over the traditional sh-shell style.

I'm unsure what specific behaviour you want from zsh and the up key, but it provides more than one up-line-*¹² function out of the box. Also, you can add any behaviour you wish with a custom zle function. That said, I understand some people prefer to just use something with the default settings.

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Zsh-Line-Editor.html#...

² https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Zsh-Line-Editor.html#...

to explain the up key:

    prompt> some-word[up key]

will search for some-word in the history.

this feature helps because in 90% of cases i can type some-word and have autosuggestion show me the right command, so i just need to hit right arrow and enter to run it. but, if the suggestion is wrong, i can instead hit up arrow and search for a another history entry.

in zsh currently, i can get autosuggestions, but if the suggestions is wrong, i have to type ctrl-A and retype some-word in order to search the history. i want to be able to do that without retyping, the way it is done in fish.

elvish only has the uparrop feature which gets me there halfway, i can type something, and then hit uparrow to find a matching command. in most cases the first hit is the one i want, but if not i keep searching.

i prefer to also have the autosuggestion because often i don't remember that i have a similar command already, and the autosuggestion provides that hint.

together these are the two most useful features that i want from a shell.

That is the difference between the up-line-or-history and up-line-or-search functions that I linked above. The default Up binding is the -history function, whereas the -search function in unbound by default. There are pattern variants too, if you don't like the prefix only checks.

If you also need to mimic the fish behaviour of C-r mid-command because your suggestion wasn't correct, then that does need a custom function to bind to C-r as you have to provide ${L,}BUFFER to populate the search pattern like fish does.

ah, thank you. that actually helps a lot. i don't use zsh as much, but it's good to know that this feature is available. i don't use ctrl-R in fish yet, so i won't miss that.

ooops, typo: ctrl-A above is supposed to be ctrl-R, in case anyone is confused

I don't remember exactly now but I have been on unixlikes forever and I am not too much into fuzzyness in general. I think it was treating upper and lower case characters the same in completions and such. Things of that nature - maybe not exactly that - but when I went to do some research about how to configure it, I realized it was not possible and that was by design. It's very good software that a lot of other shells take inspiration from but I don't agree with their methodology so I took the best bits and made zsh do them, which it can do easily. I didn't use zsh before that and now I am a huge fan.

If anybody who needs this wants to give ZSH a go, I recommend starting with only a few settings and only add new ones if you understand what they do. Same goes for plugins. I do not recommend starting with oh-my-zsh at all - which IMO is a glorified alias database anyway.

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