Extending history search in zsh

Question

How to extend Ctrl+R search in zsh? It cannot find entry despite it is in history file.

Edit: My .zsh:

setopt AUTO_CD
setopt CORRECT_ALL
setopt EXTENDED_GLOB
# History
SAVEHIST=10000
HISTFILE=~/.zsh/history
setopt APPEND_HISTORY
setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY
setopt HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
setopt NO_HIST_BEEP
setopt SHARE_HISTORY
# Keys
autoload zkbd
[[ ! -d ~/.zkbd ]] && mkdir ~/.zkbd
[[ ! -f ~/.zkbd/$TERM-${DISPLAY:-$VENDOR-$OSTYPE} ]] && zkbd
source  ~/.zkbd/$TERM-${DISPLAY:-$VENDOR-$OSTYPE}
[[ -n ${key[Home]}    ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Home]}" beginning-of-line
[[ -n ${key[End]}     ]]  && bindkey  "${key[End]}"     end-of-line
[[ -n ${key[Insert]}  ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Insert]}"  overwrite-mode
[[ -n ${key[End]}     ]]  && bindkey  "${key[End]}"     end-of-line
[[ -n ${key[Insert]}  ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Insert]}"  overwrite-mode
[[ -n ${key[Delete]}  ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Delete]}"  delete-char
[[ -n ${key[Up]}      ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Up]}" up-line-or-history
[[ -n ${key[Down]}    ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Down]}" down-line-or-history
[[ -n ${key[Left]}    ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Left]}"    backward-char
[[ -n ${key[Right]}   ]]  && bindkey  "${key[Right]}"   forward-char
# Auto completion
autoload -U compinit promptinit
compinit
promptinit
prompt clint
zstyle ':completion::complete:*' use-cache 1
# MIME
autoload -U zsh-mime-setup
zsh-mime-setup
# Calc
autoload -U zcalc
# Editor
export EDITOR=vim
# Useful
alias background="schedtool -B -e"
alias lowprio="nice -n 20 ionice -c 3"
alias blowprio="ionice -c 3 schedtool -B -e nice -n 20"

cave resolve -c should find blowprio cave resolve -c world -C a -R w --resume-file resume-world which is in .zsh/history (at least grep says so) but it finds no match.

Answer 1

You've set SAVEHIST=10000, but you left HISTSIZE at its default value of 30. That means any session will keep at most 30 entries in memory. Due to the append_history option, the history file can contain more history than kept into memory. If the entry you're searching for is not in memory, it won't be found.

Easy fix: set SAVEHIST to be larger. Most of the time SAVEHIST and HISTSIZE should be the same value.

If you're extremely short of memory, I suppose it would make sense to keep fewer entries in memory and to load them only when you search for them. But that sounds like a lot of coding effort for a rather small benefit (10000 entries would be something like a megabyte, which is large for a shell instance but not out of the question).

You would get better mileage out of your history entries with the hist_ignore_all_dups option (instead of hist_find_no_dups).

Answer 2

I don't think it is possible to "extend" this search.

In a default configuration Ctrl+R is mapped to a builtin function of the ZSH Line Edtior (zle): history-incremental-search-backward

See History Control in the ZSH Manpage.

It seems that there are no possibilities to "extend" this function.

What is the entry which is not found? Any examples?