[pdw]

Now I'm confused. Why would you want duplicate entries in your command history? I get that on an overloaded system in the 80s it might have taken a perceptable amount of time to filter out duplicates. But on a modern system you surely want it always enabled?

[jxf]

I think the people who leave it on see it as "rewriting history" -- e.g., if you typed [cmd1], [cmd1], [cmd2], and you erase duplicates, your history no longer reflects what you actually typed. The people who leave it off see the history as more like "a list of interesting things I did at some point", so erasing duplicates means it's easier to find the most interesting things.

[hansvm]

Any search of the form "what other interesting commands did I need the last time I did <foobar>?" benefits from being able to see the historical context. Or if I know the particular incantation is one I wrote several times and is very similar to some others then it's easy to search the history for the blocks of popular commands. Or whatever. It's your terminal, but given how fuzzy the interconnects in a mind can be it's hard to know what info might be useful down the road.

To your point about computing power, I think it's only now that it's reasonable to not filter the duplicates. If I want to emulate the dedup behavior it's trivial nowadays to blindly read 1M lines of history and dedup on the fly each time. Using downstream tools doing duplicate filtering/transforming work is similarly very very fast. Disk is cheap enough that I really do want to keep every command I ever write in my history. More expensive compute and disk would make me more likely to turn that feature on, not less.

[msm_]

I don't use bash so it's not applicable to me anyway, but why would I want it on? It's saving a few bytes of disk space, at the cost of ruining my history (the thing that the whole feature is about). At least fish's search feature is so awesome that I never had a problem with duplicate commands causing problems.

And I want my history untouched, because sometimes I forget how I solved something, go back a few months in my shell history and see the sequence of commands that I've used. I think that's a nice thing to have. And if I ever need history without duplicates, it should be easy to deduplicate it with a simple script.