Re: incremental history search

[Anthony Iano-Fletcher <Anthony@Iano-Fletcher.Org>]

Hello 

history-beginning-search-backward and history-beginning-search-forward
were designed to repeatedly match whatever was to the left of the cursor
with one's history. The cursor shouldn't move or else a repeated match
would not be looking for the original prefix.

For example, suppose you have this in your history:

	lspci
	uname -a
	lsmod
	date
	ls

If you type 'l<\M-p>' where \M-p is bound to
history-beginning-search-backward then you will get successively
ls, then lsmod and then lspci. Very useful if you want to choose from
any of your history that starts with an 'l'. By the way, the search
prefix is not just the first word - its everything to the left of the
cursor. So one can choose very long commands from a bunch of similar
invocations.

With zsh widgets then you can always combine this search and
end-of-line.

		Anthony.

On 21 Feb 2004 at 14:52:15, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> * Eric Mangold (2004-02-21 04:07 +0100)
> > On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 02:35:14 +0100, Thorsten Kampe 
> > <thorsten@thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
> >> * Eric Mangold (2004-02-21 02:17 +0100)
> >>> On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 00:04:00 +0100, Thorsten Kampe
> >>> <thorsten@thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
> >>>> I have bound[1] the cursor keys to "up-line-or-search" and
> >>>> down-line-or-search. Unfortunately this only completes the first word
> >>>> of the search; meaning when I type
> >>>>
> >>>> wget http://foo.com
> >>>> wget ftp://bar.com
> >>>>
> >>>> and then...
> >>>> wget http[up cursor]
> >>>> ...it completes to "wget ftp://bar.com" and not to the desired "wget
> >>>> http://foo.com". It only searches matches for the first word ("wget")
> >>>> of the already typed command line in history.
> >>>>
> >>>> Is it possible to make zsh search for matches of the whole command
> >>>> line ("wget http") - and not only the first word?
> >>>
> >>> Yes. I use the following bindings for that.
> >>>
> >>> bindkey '\M-p' history-beginning-search-backward
> >>> bindkey '\M-n' history-beginning-search-forward
> >>
> >> Aah, seems like exactly what I want. Are there any functional
> >> disadvantages compared to "up-line-or-search"/"down-line-or-search"
> >> (because it seems to me as "history-beginning-search-backward" is a
> >> superset of "up-line-or-search")?
> > 
> > I can't think of any disadvantages, [...]
> 
> Hm, now the cursor stays at the beginning of the command line when I
> haven't typed anything and press the up cursor - contrary to the
> movement to the end of the command line with "up-line-or-search".
> Probably because of the missing "up-line" functionality.
> 
> It's a bit of a nuisance because I more often change things at the end
> of a command line than at the beginning but I think the extra
> functionality of "history-beginning-search-backward" makes it a gain
> for me though.
> 
> Thorsten