[zedshaw]

Man, I used to use fish. It was great. It was like all the things people eventually make zsh do but in one convenient binary.

I think my favorite feature was that history was instantly shared among all your open fish instances.

[ethereal]

zsh used to do this for me (back when I used it; switched back to bash about a year ago now), and it was the most _annoying_ thing it ever did. My typical workflow (when working on a software project) involves a pair of terminals for compiling and execution, an editor window (whether gvim or kate/kile/kdevelop etc.), and a documentation terminal for manpages.

Oftentimes my execution lines are somewhat long -- enabling/disable debugging info in certain sections of the program while tracing programs, etc, and I'd not want to type them out continuously. As a result I'd use the command history a lot, muscle memory would automatically hit CTRL-P once I switched to one of my execution terminals. If I'd visited something in the documentation terminal in the meantime, I'd be staring at 'man 2 timer_create' instead of my expected './aesalon --set listen=6421 --set ::debug-shm --set ::debug-interaction'. The third-second or so I'd need to do a sanity check would seriously interrupt my train of thought.

It's neat, and I can see why people like it. But for my particular one use-case of terminals/shells, it was annoying. Took me about a week before I realized just how much it was slowing me down and disabled it.

[I probably should have just set up another zsh configuration for those particular terminals, but enough years with bash have trained me, I guess, to not expect it from my shell.]

[entropie]

You could have simply turned history sharing off...

[adambyrtek]

I prefer a middle ground, in which entries from multiple sessions are interleaved in the history file, but individual in-memory histories don't reflect what happened in other sessions in the meantime.

For future reference, I use the following Zsh history options:

  setopt incappendhistory
  setopt extendedhistory
  setopt histignorespace
  setopt histignoredups

[sliverstorm]

I think what would be slickest is if up-arrow and down-arrow navigate local history, but history-search would navigate all history... I wonder if I can make it do that.

[mybuddymichael]

What do you use now? And why did you switch?