Please elaborate on point 1b. I certainly see ways ctrl-r can be improved, but orders of magnitude (while obviously subjective in something like this) would surprise me. That said, I hope to be surprised!
Sure. There's no single feature improvement that is much better, but when considering the improvements together the difference is striking.
1. The search term is highlighted.
2. The search is far more discoverable, its key binding means you can stumble across it.
3. The up cursor key is a better key binding choice.
Pressing up without a search term may be considered as searching for commands that match "", namely everything. This conforms with fish's aim for orthogonality.
4. (Most importantly) The up cursor key has a natural undo button, down. Quick quiz: if you type "Ctrl-r foobarbaz", how do you get back to a terminal you can type in, preserving your search term? You can't. Pressing "Esc" dumps you in the middle of your history with something matching the first few characters of your search term. (Assuming you have nothing in your history matching 'foobarbaz')
Similarly, if you press "Ctrl-r foo Ctrl-r", you will get the second item in your history that matches foo. There's no way to get back to your first search result without repeating the search.
5. You can use previous commands as search terms. For example, I ran "mvn clean install", then hit "Ctrl-C" when I wanted to skip tests. I pressed "<Up> <Space> <Up>" and I was searching through all my history that contains "mvn install ". Using "Ctrl-C" I'd have had to retype "mvn clean install ".
Thanks! 1, 4, and 5 in particular do seem useful. Having up search and down cancel is a win for orthogonality, but loses a touch in flexibility (if I'm searching, find something, and then realize I want to run the command before or after it, for instance). On balance, I think fish is doing it right for new users but I don't see anything there that's worth the shift for those of us who have the muscle memory for the other.
One thing I've missed from ctrl-r is the ability to drop in (an implicit or explicit) .* in my search - often, I start my search and hit a line, and I know what will disambiguate but it's a ways down the line.
> if you press "Ctrl-r foo Ctrl-r", you will get the second item in your history that matches foo. There's no way to get back to your first search result without repeating the search.
