How can I enable something like Windows-style command history traversal in bash?

Question

Personally I prefer the Windows way of command history traversal (sorry!) where each command retains its place in the history and when you return to the last-executed command it's not necessarily last in the history.

Not sure if that makes sense so I will try to explain with examples.

Bash

Suppose I executed four commands (one, two, three, four). After this, the command history (from earliest to most recent) looks like:

• one
• two
• three
• four

Now if I press up three times, I will go back to four, then three, then two as expected. If I press enter, I will execute command two. Now the history looks like:

• one
• two
• three
• four
• two

If I press ↑ I will see two. If I press it again, I will see four and so on.

Windows

Suppose I executed the same four commands (one, two, three, four). After this, the command history (from earliest to most recent) looks like:

• one
• two
• three
• four

Now if I press up three times, I will go back to four, then three, then two as before. If I press enter, I will execute command two. Now pressing ↑ again, it will still show two. But the history still looks like:

• one
• two
• three
• four

What this means is that I have "jumped" back to an earlier point in the history. I can now press ↑ to see one, or ↓ to see three, etc.

Why this is useful

This is particularly useful when you have just run a series of commands and you want to run them again. It involves significantly less keystrokes to run the whole series again.

Is there a way to cause bash to behave the same way?

Answer 1

This doesn't directly answer your question, but it may be helpful if there ends up being no true answer.

If you've executed some sequence of commands:

$ one
$ two
$ three
$ four

$ history
1  one
2  two
3  thee
4  four

and you want to execute the sequence again, you could do the following:

!1; !2; !3; !4

Or, if you want to execute subsequent commands only if the earlier ones succeeded:

!1 && !2 && !3 && !4

Then, you'll get an entry like that in your history:

$ history
1  one
2  two
3  three
4  four
5  one; two; three; four
6  one && two && three && four

Then, if you want to re-execute that sequence again, you can use the arrows or just use, for instance, !5