This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
Task
The goal here is to quickly search the command line history using glob pattern matching.
Situation
When reverse searching the command line history using ctrl-r, a lot of characters have to be typed before arriving at the correct command. For example, to go to “cd ~/work/gitlab/rutils”, one approach is to
ctrl-r cd<space>
and keep hitting ctrl-r until arriving at
cd ~/work/gitlab/rutils
Another approach is to
ctrl-r cd ~/work/gitlab/r <enter>
Here almost the entire command had to be typed since the user did many “cd ~/work/gitlab/xxx” type of commands after doing “cd ~/work/gitlab/rutils”.
Ideally, we want to avoid all this typing and get to the final command by typing a few keywords - say cd, rutils.
Solution
Add the following lines to ~/.zshrc.
# Use glob patterns when using ctrl-r # ctrl-r wordA*wordB # will match commands where wordA is followed by wordB with zero or more number # of characters in between. This functionality is not available in old zsh # versions (ex:- 4.2.6) so check for its availability. zle -al | grep -q history-incremental-pattern-search-backward if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then bindkey "\C-r" history-incremental-pattern-search-backward fi
After this
ctrl-r cd*rutils
will match commands where cd is followed by rutils.
System Information
Tested this tip using zsh 5.0.7 on a machine running Debian Jessie.
% dpkg -l zsh | grep ^ii ii zsh 5.0.7-5 amd64 shell with lots of features
tags | reverse search using partial matches shell, reverse search using multiple words shell, use glob patterns in ctrl-r
Related links
* My zshrc file - https://gitlab.com/d3k2mk7/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/zshrc