[bee_rider]

Actually, this seems like an interesting question. I don’t really see any reason why a shell must load the history file before the user starts typing. I mean, I usually don’t ^r immediately, so to speed things up it could:

* Load asynchronously

* Only have a barrier if I reverse-search.

Might be over-engineered, though.

[loeg]

zsh may very well be doing this, especially for any de-duplication index.