Ivy reverse-i-search

Introduction

I'm sure many are aware of the C-r functionality in bash (a whole lot of Emacs bindings are valid in bash and do the same thing). I also like the quirky Emacs-style prompt, that uses a backquote to open and a straight quote to close a your quoted input:

So when you want to cd to somewhere where you were before you do C-r cd. And then the C-r "roulette" begins: you keep pressing C-r over and over, in the hopes to find what you were looking for.

Getting better history completion with Ivy

Ivy improves the "roulette" situation in two ways:

• You get an overview of the matching candidates and their count,
• You can quickly narrow down the candidates with fuzzy matching.

Here's the basic setup to enable C-r completion using ivy:

(define-key minibuffer-local-map
    (kbd "C-r") 'counsel-minibuffer-history)
(define-key shell-mode-map
    (kbd "C-r") 'counsel-shell-history)

The first key binding is also part of counsel-mode, while the second needs to be set up separately, after shell-mode was loaded.

And here's how counsel-shell-history looks like:

The cool thing is that ivy-reverse-i-search applies to any Ivy command, not just for shell command completion. I find it especially useful for:

• counsel-find-file
• eval-expression

Recent improvement: delete history items

While searching with regexes is great, it's not so great when the old stuff that we won't ever need gets in the way. So now you can delete it with C-k. Since C-k also has to serve as ivy-kill-line, the history deleting behavior will only come into effect when the point is at the end of the line (so that ivy-kill-line does not make sense anyway).

This way, your typos don't stay around to haunt you.

Outro

I hope you'll find ivy-reverse-i-search a useful boost to your completion needs. Happy hacking!