A better command history for your terminal

I just discovered fzf, a lightning fast fuzzy search you can integrate into almost everything. I found it to be super useful as a replacement for the ctrl+r shell history search.

^r now looks like this:

There are a couple of plugins for this purpose, but I like to avoid a plugin manager and keep my zsh config clean. So I wrote it from scratch.

On a Mac, you install fzf easiest with Homebrew:

brew install fzf

Here's my configuration from my ~/.zshrc.

# fzf history
fzf_history_search() {
  export LC_ALL=C # reset locales to avoid issues with cut
  BUFFER=$(eval cat ~/.zsh_history | cut -d ';' -f 2 | awk '!x[$0]++' | fzf -e --preview-window=hidden --tac -q "$BUFFER")
  zle end-of-line; # move cursor to end of line
}

autoload fzf_history_search
zle -N fzf_history_search

bindkey '^r' fzf_history_search  # Bind Ctrl+r to fzf_history_search