Reconsidering bang history

As much as I like the idea of bang history expansion in the shell, I probably end up escaping “!” much more than I use it.

The three bang history features I ever used enough to care about are easily replaced:

• !! is harder to enter than pressing ↑ once.

• !$ - The keybinding opt. (a default on macos zsh) inserts the last argument of the prior command line, which is easier to type and more convenient.

• ^^ - The r command, which I recently discovered, is just as easy to use:

  % print yes
  yes
  % r yes=no
  print no
  no
  

All the other bang history features take me longer to remember and enter than just editing a prior command.

So, I’m going test drive this option for a while:

setopt nobanghist