Zsh, up arrow only repeats unique commands

historyterminalzsh

I'm looking for a setting that will make it so that when i hit the up arrow, zsh shows commands i have recently edited. The catch is, i only want unique commands. Currently, if i type echo "hello world" 50 times, i have to press up arrow 50 times to get the command i used before typing the echo command. This is annoying to say the least.

Any thoughts on what setting i need to enable/disable?

Best Answer

HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS will throw out all previous matches of the command, which can be confusing when using the history as a log of what you did later:

HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS: If a new command line being added to the history list duplicates an older one, the older command is removed from the list (even if it is not the previous event).

A closer fit to your needs is probably the HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS option:

HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS: When searching for history entries in the line editor, do not display duplicates of a line previously found, even if the duplicates are not contiguous.

Or maybe the HIST_IGNORE_DUPS, but, as RichieHH notes, it also leads to an incomplete account of history:

HIST_IGNORE_DUPS: Do not enter command lines into the history list if they are duplicates of the previous event.

See: man zshoptions | less -p History.

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ZSH only displaying last 16 or so commands with history. HISTSIZE & SAVEHIST are 500

history 1 (or history 1 -1) will display all entries from 1 (first entry) to -1 (last entry). You can also use history 1 100 to display the first 100 entries or history -100 -1 to display the last 100 etc.

For more information see the section on fc in man zshbuiltins. (history is equivalent to fc -l).

Command history in zsh

You've probably got INC_APPEND_HISTORY set.

The INC_APPEND_HISTORY option, from man zshoptions:

This options works like APPEND_HISTORY except that new history lines are added to the $HISTFILE incrementally (as soon as they are entered), rather than waiting until the shell exits.

The option that you want is APPEND_HISTORY:

APPEND_HISTORY If this is set, zsh sessions will append their history list to the history file, rather than replace it. Thus, multiple parallel zsh sessions will all have the new entries from their history lists added to the history file, in the order that they exit. The file will still be periodically re-written to trim it when the number of lines grows 20% beyond the value specified by $SAVEHIST (see also the HIST SAVE BY COPY option).

You can read about these options in the man zshoptions, man zshall or online here.

To set them, in your ~/.zshrc or similar, you should have:

setopt APPEND_HISTORY

Be aware that, if you're using oh-my-zsh by default, I believe, INC_APPEND_HISTORY is used. I'm not 100% sure which way around things get loaded, but if the oh-my-zsh option overrides the one you've set in ~/.zshrc, you can fiddle with it in ~/.oh-my-zsh/lib/history.zsh

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ZSH only displaying last 16 or so commands with history. HISTSIZE & SAVEHIST are 500

Command history in zsh

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