[fsckboy]

this sort of topic illustrates the type of vexing problems that I wish a community model was better at addressing. Chasing and solving your own pain points is cool but frequently creates new pain points for other people. I love more features for searching history, but...

the reason bash uses Ctrl-r for searching back in history is because that's EMACS for searching back in your edit buffer (like C-a, C-f, C-b, C-e, etc are emacs cursor motions). I like the features of fzf, but I hate that it suddenly changes muscle memory that I rely on that is bigger than the immediate context.

these kinds of problems show up all over. I have always relied heavily on "middle button pastes the current mouse selection". I don't know what's going on in linux--is it Wayland?--but that feature is increasingly and increasingly being broken in more and more places. one place (which may entail a different "feature creep") is "click the url-bar in the browser and it auto-selects the whole thing...uh uh uh, wait, but not anymore for the purposes of the X-selection. but you can get the X-selection back if you click again (to deselect the whole thing) then again to reselect the whole thing... or is it double click..." the mind boggles

the old way (or goal) was to have the UI be standard, everywhere used the same code. but there were always people who wanted to innovate on their own, then with the idea of UX it wasn't any longer about standardization--or ironically personalization--at all

I realize whoever are making these changes simply don't work the way I have (for the last 35 yrs (well, that's just with linux)) so they don't notice what's being thrown away. I guess it's getting close to that time I should climb on and drift away on a little ice raft...

[fergie]

100% agree. FWIW I use ctrl-r all day every day in emacs and also in the shell and its... fine.

In my opinion, the one thing that would make a difference is a longer and broader history.

[danwills]

It is possible to change the history length in most shells including bash, when I googled it I found this baeldung.com article which says it can be set to unlimited using this (or use a big number if you'd prefer!):

export HISTSIZE=-1; export HISTFILESIZE=-1

Also, one can bind the 'up' key to do the search action too, which I think is pretty convenient, my bindings are for zsh but I think it should also work in bash:

bindkey '^[[5~' up-line-or-history

bindkey '^[[6~' down-line-or-history

[jvan]

Changes that some applications made for Wayland definitely broke pasting for me. It seems Wayland added a separate clipboard so going between apps was a crapshoot if pasting would work. I haven't found a solution that covers everything at once.