oh-my-zsh history completion

Question

I have recently switched to zsh, using robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh. Before that i used bash with a lot of custom stuff and i am only missing one thing because zsh is trying to be 'too smart':

If i type git commit and then ↑ zsh goes through all recent git commands. What i really want though, is going through all commands that start with git commit (not just git).

How can i achieve this behavior in (oh-my-)zsh?

Strange, I use OMZSH and it does behave like this. Do you have 'plugins=(git)' in your zshrc? — Chris2048, Apr 28 '12 at 12:29
yes i do, but it is not only for git, all commands are completed this way. — Patrick Oscity, Apr 28 '12 at 18:21

Patrick Oscity · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-09T22:10:09.643

81

I have found the solution to my problem in the ZSH documentation. Oh-my-zsh seems to map the ↑ and ↓ Keys to something like

bindkey '\e[A' history-search-backward
bindkey '\e[B' history-search-forward

Which yields the exact behavior I described above. The ZSH Documentation describes the behavior of history-search-backward as

Search backward in the history for a line beginning with the first word in the buffer.

What I wanted instead was the following mapping, which I inserted into my ~/.zshrc:

bindkey '\e[A' history-beginning-search-backward
bindkey '\e[B' history-beginning-search-forward

The behavior of history-beginning-search-backward is as follows:

Search forward in the history for a line beginning with the current line up to the cursor. This leaves the cursor in its original position.

Also, if \e[A doesn't work for the up or down arrows, press <ctrl-v><KEY (e.g., up arrow)> in another terminal which gives ^[OA. Then you can use this instead of \e[A. The process is described here: http://zshwiki.org/home/zle/bindkeys

edited Jan 09 '14 at 22:10

answered Apr 29 '12 at 11:38

Patrick Oscity

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Thank you thank you thank you!! I was going nuts over this – mhenrixon Mar 19 '14 at 11:46
For non-OMZ user like me: `bindkey` doesn't do anything real, due to a bug, so OMZ team patched it with [this plugin](https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/blob/3477ff25274fa75bd9e6110f391f6ad98ca2af72/plugins/safe-paste/safe-paste.plugin.zsh). Simply download it and source it before `bindkey`. – Franklin Yu Nov 25 '16 at 15:22
@FranklinYu you do realize that's total bs, right? that plugin doesn't do anything with bindkey except USE it to catch some events. – nonchip Jul 25 '18 at 18:38
Wow, this is perfect! – Squirrel Sep 07 '18 at 08:48
Just an FYI that the link provided is a 404. Try https://zshwiki.org/home/keybindings/ instead. Cheers. – sming Apr 02 '22 at 16:08

score 15 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 17 '14 at 15:28

I wanted the same behaviour for zsh with oh-my-zsh installed and found plugin history-substring-search.

I achieved the same behaviour described above by adding the plugin to my ~/.zshrc:

plugins=(git brew npm history-substring-search)

I guess this plugin did not exist back when this question was raised. Just an alternate way to achieve the same thing.

oh-my-zsh history completion

2 Answers2

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