How does history work in fish shell?

Question

I'm a bash user, starting a new job at a place where people use fish shell.

I'm looking at the history command which I often use in bash. When I use it in fish I get a long list of my history which I can scroll up and down on with the arrow keys.

There are no numbers like in bash and pressing enter is the same as the down key.

How can I run a past command with fish shell's history?

Solution

The history command here isn't bash-compatible, it's just displaying it in a pager (e.g. less).

To select an old command, you'll probably want to enter the part you remember right into the commandline, press up-arrow until you have found what you want and then press enter to execute.

E.g. on my system I enter mes, press up and rm -I meson.build appears (with the "mes" part highlighted). I then press enter and it executes.

Comments

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

But what if you don't remember the command, but read your history and find it out? E.g. “whichever command I ran immediately after that one” or “that command contained the name of a Chinese emperor but I don't remember which one”.

[Philip Kirkbride]

Thanks faho and yes @gilles another big downside is that you can't really use a double grep.

[Zanchey]

You can search the history with the usual pager command (usually '/'), or pipe it through grep or other commands. Like git, or systemctl, the pager is only used if the output is directly to a TTY.

[dave]

Documentation can be found here: fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#history