zsh history up-arrow history completion not working

Question

I am not able to get the zsh history keybindings to work the way I'd like. I'd like to be able to type sudo and then use the up arrow to scroll through all history commands with the prefix sudo.

I believe this should be bindkey "^[[5~" up-line-or-history. I have that in lib/key-bindings.zsh and that file should be sourced. I am using a largely unmodified installation of oh-my-zsh.

I have what I think is the same .zshrc and lib files on a VM and history works as I want. The VM is running zsh 4.3.10 while my other machine (the one that is not working) is on 5.0.0. Is this a version issue?

Answer 1

I'm not sure, if that changed from 4.3.10 to 5.0.0, but the widget you are searching for is called history-search-backward in the last few releases.

Also a nice key binding is history-incremental-pattern-search-backward where you can input (at a special prompt after invoking that widget) for example sudo*destdir to cycle through all commands starting with sudo and ending with destdir.

Answer 2

See https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/1720

Adding this to .zshrc solved it for me:

# start typing + [Up-Arrow] - fuzzy find history forward
if [[ "${terminfo[kcuu1]}" != "" ]]; then
    autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search
    zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search
    bindkey "${terminfo[kcuu1]}" up-line-or-beginning-search
fi
# start typing + [Down-Arrow] - fuzzy find history backward
if [[ "${terminfo[kcud1]}" != "" ]]; then
    autoload -U down-line-or-beginning-search
    zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search
    bindkey "${terminfo[kcud1]}" down-line-or-beginning-search
fi

Answer 3

To make it work on Ubuntu do echo DEBIAN_PREVENT_KEYBOARD_CHANGES=yes>>~/.zshenv.