Substring History Search in ZSH

Our unices shells are wonderful tools to interact with our OS. That's my main user interface. I use it for everything. I only use three graphical softwares : a web browser, a media player and a terminal emulator. That's all.

I admit that i have a very volatile memory. I can't remember a thing I only do once or twice a year. I forget a lot of commands. That's why i use Foldcat as seen earlier. But it's still not optimal. I have another trick !

Commands history 🔗

Yous shell log every command you enter in a file. This file is history or zhistory somewhore in your /home. Most of shells lets you search automatically in this file with Ctrl-r which is not bad. But that's far from optimal. We will add a script to ZSH the great.

Put this file in /etc/zsh/zsh-history-substring-search.zsh and we now need to tell ZSH how to use it. Go in /etc/zsh/zshrc and add source /etc/zsh/zsh-history-substring-search.zsh in the beggining (where all other "sources" are (it's better sort them together).

Now we must bind a key to trigger the script. Stil il /etc/zsh/zshrc but near the end of the file this time (with all your keybinds) : bindkey "^[[A" history-substring-search-up and bindkey "^[[B" history-substring-search-down. There you go. ^[[A as you guess means the up arrow of your keyboard and ^[[B the down one.

Using this thing now 🔗

Open a new shell (or source your zshrc, but frankly it's faster to open a new one). Start typing a command like hugo ne , then press the up arrow and you should have your command completed with the latest command. You can use your arrows multiple times. And voilà !

That's easy and really fast. You don't even need to type the beggining of a command. Any part will fit. It should be in all default shell options !