Show long commands in fish (ctrl+r) history on multiple lines

Question

I'm looking for a solution to searching history with fish when your history is full of long commands. I often have curl commands that contain json payloads in my history that I want to repeat, for example, and they're long enough that they don't fit into a single line, which makes it very hard to differentiate between them at a glance. My current solution is to type more of what I want but its pretty annoying.

Is there a way to make the history entries appear as they were executed, without reducing them to a single line? Is there a more clever solution I'm not thinking to ask for?

Answer 1

This was asked in Feature Request history multiline commands #2585, where two workaround were suggested by users:

• Apply splitting manually.
  For example: set line (echo $history[1]) for the most recent history element.

• Using sed to split lines in the file fish_history.

Unfortunately, this Feature Request was never marked as assigned to a developer.

Answer 2

As I commented on your closed SO version of this question, I had a similar question with Nushell. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any fuzzy-finder in any shell (or non-shell) implementation that supports multi-line content in the finder itself.

It's not optimal, but there is a bit of workaround with fzf that I used with Nushell. The "Preview" function in fzf can modify the results, and you can use this to turn the history back into a properly formatted, multi-line (and even syntax-highlighted) result. In Nushell, that was with nu-highlight and Fish's built-in fish_indent --ansi essentially does the same thing (and a bit better, since it properly indents). That can at least turn the single-line output in the "Finder" into a multi-line preview that is more readable.

The general format of the command that you can test at the Fish command-line is:

commandline --replace $(history --null | fzf --read0 --preview "echo {} | fish_indent --ansi")

Also, this fzf plugin for Fish has the preview already enabled, but I would recommend setting the preview window to the right so that you can see as many lines as possible.