Re: history expansion

I use history substitution all the time. I'm occasionally annoyed by the
need to extra-quote exclamation points, but not enough to give up the
feature, which you can always turn off with *unsetopt banghist*.

Erik: the confirmation you're getting is controlled by the *histverify *
option.

On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 6:39 AM Erik Wybouw <[email protected]> wrote:

> I use it a lot (coming from tcsh where I developed the muscle memory for
> it).
>
> ZLE (at least mine, but can’t immediately find the option) can expand the
> line for you as you hit enter, requiring a second confirmation enter to
> actually execute, so that helps, and I’ve taken the habit of tab-expanding
> ‘!’ constructs myself immediately as I type the line.
>
> ps: also unclear where that tab is coming from, as I have expand-history
> only bound to ESC prefixed combinations.
>
> Kind regards, erik.
> —
> Erik Wybouw
>
>
>
> On 12 Jul 2026, at 10:57, Vincent Lefevre <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I'm wondering whether users use history expansion in practice, as it
> does not seem to be very useful with the power of ZLE (I suppose that
> one can do the same kind of things, with the advantage of seeing the
> immediate effect).
>
> It can have a surprising behavior. For instance, after "zsh -f":
>
> qaa% echo "foo!"
> dquote>
>
> Note that bash does not have any issue here. But there is the same
> behavior with the less common
>
>  echo "foo!!"
>
> --
> Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
>
>
>

-- 
Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>