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Comment by bretthoerner | Hacker News Reader

> You can arrow-up to go to previous commands just like in bash. But if you start a command (say, ssh) and then arrow-up you will then be cycling back through the last ways you entered that command.

Or, if you'd like to do this in Bash, and any program that uses readline: In ~/.inputrc

    # Bind the up arrow to history search, instead of history step
    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    # And the reverse (down)
    "\e[B": history-search-forward

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I find it easier to just hit ^R when I want to search my history. And since that's a default keybinding, it works on any machine I touch.

I recently moved from tcsh to zsh, and this is one thing that seems to be a bit weird in zsh. For example, given

    git clone
    git rebase master
    git log

in my history, if I typed

    git r<UP>

I get 'git log', not 'git rebase master' as I'd expect.

Try:

  bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backward

And that's why no one wants to bother switching.

Actually, that's exactly why I switched. (more precisely, this could be said why: http://www.cs.elte.hu/zsh-manual/zsh_14.html)

If you don't want to use it, I don't see how that is any of my business. I was just trying to help out somebody who does, so there's hardly any reason to be an ass.

To be honest, I tried it years back and liked it, but forgot about it and didn't miss it. I may try it again sometime.

All I'm saying is that most people won't like something that offers no immediate major benefit and has annoying defaults that they have to find an obscure setting to fix. This is probably why so few use emacs, even though it is awesome :)

Everything has annoying defaults until you either change them or get used to them.

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