instead of searching backwards in commands, it does it in the buffer.
How do people deal with this?
Having switched recently to Emacs, my current issue is how to get Emacs shell history saved properly for my other shell buffers, and getting completions from shell (not Emacs) to work, planning to try MisTTY soon.
for the past half year i'm using emacs without any extra competition packages and it's surprisingly usable as-is.
i haven't even customized the completion styles and it's fine!
i got used to typing `M-x -forward<TAB>` if i want to find a command which contains the word "forward" and not just starts with it.
i do have karabiner elements remapping my keys under macOS and i use a tweaked version of @jeebak 's SpaceFn layout, where i've mapped Opt on holding the semicolon key, which still acts as semicolon, when tapped.
that way M-r is pretty convenient to type. M-p is less so though, because i switch to the regular opt key for that... i should really have to get used to my glove80 keyboard to avoid such quirks...
otherwise, as others have mentioned it, remap the keys!
also, you can talk to some LLM about it, if you feel it would be tedious to come up with better bindings.
feed in the key bindings from `C-h m` of eshell, enumerate which bindings you want to carry over from traditional shells and instruct it to recommend you binding swapping pairs.
i was able to get great results on such niche operations already from anthropic's opus 4.5 models but even grok or deepseek was pretty helpful already last summer.
steve yegge's efrit takes this to a whole new level, by letting the LLM interrogate your running Emacs process live for documentation or function source code:
https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit
he demoed it here:
Cmd+Up - jumps you to the top of the last command
Cmd+F - just search for what you want
I don't need no stinkin' Emacs
I've also tried some new shells, the one I last more is xonsh, but generally I came back to zsh even if I use in general much less the shell than before thanks to Emacs, the 2D shell.
Emacs completion also it's very nice for text, but slower than tab-cycle in zsh as well and for quick commands that's matter.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat
With regards to completion, I use corfu, which gives me nice inline popups. I use the bash-completion package, so I don't have issues with programs that don't provide Eshell completions (which are basically all of them).
You have no idea how much this helps me.
there are some quirks with it though, given it has a couple of input modes.
i think everyone should read its fantastic documentation 1st to avoid frustration, instead of just falling back to the local minima of trying to use their pimped up shell inside eat as is.
e.g. i had a 2 line starship prompt enabled in my macOS zsh and inside eat it made the screen scroll back and forth by half a page randomly as i was just typing regular characters at the prompt.
M-<left>/<right> moves the Emacs point in semi-char mode, but the underlying shell is not aware of it, so the next character input will happen at an incorrect position. M-f/b works though.
There is an auto-line-mode, which might be a good compromise, but i haven't tried it yet.
