On: Zsh: The last shell you will ever need

[signa11]

i think it would be supercool if the history function actually stored only the different commands that are being executed, rather than a timestamped version of the command...

[timf → signa11]

Not sure about this in the context of that histappend stuff, but bash can do that normally: use HISTIGNORE and "&". Here is my HISTIGNORE:

  export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:ls -la"

That will ignore duplicates, "ls", and "ls -la"

That's for local shell history, I also record every command to a file based archive (see my other comment in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992772 ).