The ‘history’ command shows all commands kept in the history ring
as numbered list. If the history ring contains
eshell-history-size commands, those numbers change after every
command invocation, therefore the ‘history’ command shall be
applied before using the expansion mechanism with history numbers.
The n-th entry of the history ring can be applied with the ‘!n’
command. If n is negative, the entry is counted from the end
of the history ring.
When history event designators are enabled (by adding
eshell-expand-history-references to
eshell-expand-input-functions), ‘!foo’ expands to the last
command beginning with foo, and ‘!?foo’ to the last
command containing foo. The n-th argument of the last command
beginning with foo is accessible by !foo:n.
The history ring is loaded from a file at the start of every session,
and written back to the file at the end of every session. The file path
is specified in eshell-history-file-name. Unlike other shells,
such as Bash, Eshell can not be configured to keep a history ring of a
different size than that of the history file.
Since the default buffer navigation and searching key-bindings are still present in the Eshell buffer, the commands for history navigation and searching are bound to different keys:
History I-search.
Previous and next history line. If there is anything on the input line when you run these commands, they will instead jump to the previous or next line that begins with that string.