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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

> But I still used the up/down arrow keys for years or scrolled up when I was looking for a previous command

It's not even that bad of a habit with zsh either where it will only scroll through history matching a substring in your history, for instance if I type "rg -i" and then start pressing up arrow, it will only cycle through history entries starting with "rg -i".

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if you enable history substring search in zsh you can get that feature anywhere in the command and not just the start. it's very useful if you remember some snippet of the command like it had the word debug in it etc. in fish that is built in and on by default.

though one function that i recently added will narrow your history down based on a space separated set of filters which i found useful

    function hgrep
        set -l cmd history
        for pattern in $argv
            set cmd "$cmd | grep -- "(string escape "$pattern")
        end
        eval $cmd | cat
    end

use `hgrep ruby debug foo` would filter for a line that contained all the words ruby, debug and foo.

This is a readline feature. You can enable it in bash (and other shells?) with:

bind '"\e[A": history-search-backward'

bind '"\e[B": history-search-forward'

Clearly I am missing some setting. On zsh on macOS and I tried what you just said and it doesn't work like this

FWIW I'm also on macos 15.7.9, zsh 5.9, oh-my-zsh - and I do get this behavior (TIL).

type eg "rg" then up or down arrow, and the history shown is filtered by that rg prefix.

Isn't oh-my-zsh one of those batteries-included distributions? It sounds like that's just one of the configurations that it provides.

I was missing it too. Google says it's a builtin zsh feature but mac doesn't turn it on by default, so you add these to `~/.zshrc`

    bindkey '^[[A' history-search-backward
    bindkey '^[[B' history-search-forward

So far it works. Thank you diath.

I'm not really sure what "turn it on by default" even means in the context of a shell. I've had that manually in my config for years.

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