I recently switched back to bash shell from zsh and in doing so I lost zsh’s history search. From your zsh prompt if you type in part of a command and then press the up arrow, you’ll be shown the previous occurrence of that command. Repeated up arrows walk you through all previous occurrences. A very handy tool, and one I grew fond of.
Here’s how to have this history search in bash.
First use the read command to learn what code is transmitted by the up or down arrow key press.
$ read
^[[A # up arrow
^[[B # down arrow
Control-c will return you to your prompt from the read builtin command.
Parsing the up and down arrow strings reveals that they both start with an escape character ^[ and
then the key value itself: [A or [B.
The bash function to search history is history-search-backward or history-search-forward. So
binding ^[[A to history-search-backward and ^[[B to history-search-forward emulates the
arrow key behavior from zsh.
Here is what I have in my .bash_bindkeys file, which is sourced from my .bashrc file.
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'
The \e is the escape character (^[) from the read builtin output. With these bindings in my .bashrc I can enter part of a command and search back through my history using my arrow keys.