[matthewn]

"By way of comparison, on my home PC I used a third-party command shell called 4DOS [...] It had a wonderful command line history mechanism: type part of a command, then press up-arrow."

Want in bash? Add to ~/.inputrc:

# up and down arrows do incremental history search

"\e[A": history-search-backward

"\e[B": history-search-forward

[krakensden]

By default, ^R starts an incremental history search.

[chipsy]

Why do old Unix programs always have bad defaults?

[zokier]

Because the defaults come from 70's, and lots of nice stuff has added since, but nobody dared to touch the defaults.

[moomba]

This is the first thing I change in any linux system I'm working with. I've become completely dependent on prefixed history.

Never liked the Ctrl+R thing.