Tips for loading zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

[mattmc3]

I commented on Reddit about this, but felt it also made sense to add here in case others would benefit from finding this in the future:

u/logicbus asks:

I'm new to Antidote and I'm trying to get zsh-history-substring-search working with it. I'm also using Zephyr. I looked through some discussions but about zsh-history-substring-search with Antidote but I'm wondering if those discussions are out of date now that Antidote hit 2.0.

Is there an explain-like-I'm-five version?

My answer:

zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search (called HSS for the rest of this comment) is a bit of a pain for 2 main reasons which are detailed in the project's README.md:

1. It can conflict with other plugins like zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting, so you need to load it in a certain order (ie: after syntax highlighting)
2. It's not very useful without the keybindings, and it frustratingly does't add them by default

Antidote is plugin agnostic, so it doesn't have any special handling built-in for any particular plugin's eccentricities, but it's not too tricky to set up. I use this plugin myself. Here's what you do:

First, in your ~/.zshrc define a function that sets up the keybindings before loading antidote:

# .zshrc
function hss-bindkey() {
  zmodload zsh/terminfo
  local keymap
  for keymap in 'main' 'emacs' 'viins'; do
    bindkey -M "$keymap" "$terminfo[kcuu1]" history-substring-search-up
    bindkey -M "$keymap" "$terminfo[kcud1]" history-substring-search-down
  done
}

# now load antidote
source /path/to/antidote.zsh
antidote load

Next, in your ~/.zsh_plugins.txt, include HSS and tell it to bind your keys after loading using the post:<FUNC> annotation:

# .zsh_plugins.txt

### ... load other plugins first with HSS near the bottom

zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search post:hss-bindkey

That's my best ELI5 - hope that helps clears things up.