Ctrl R not working after upgrading iterm2 to ohmysh

[tmel173]

Sometime ago installed iterm2 as a I usually do on all my Macs terminal but after I went to ohmzsh I seem to have lost my "ctrl + r" cycling through my history for some reason.

I resolved this issue on my work computer which was also installed iTerm2 but no OHMYZSH. I resolved it by remapping the keybindings in the OHMZSH config file ~/.zshrc as below :

#source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.zsh
bindkey -M viins 'ˆr' history-incremental-search-backward
bindkey -M vicmd 'ˆr' history-incremental-search-backward
bindkey -v

This didn't work on my personal laptop and can't seem to figure out what the issue is. I could try remove ohmyzsh but I'm reluctant to do that as I had customized so beautifully.

[carlosala]

If you want to use vi keybindings, I recommend using the vi-modeplugin and not changing anything else about bindkey.
^r will work out of the box.

[tmel173]

This resolved my issue btw but I wanted to understand further. Thanks very much!

[carlosala]

@tmel173 of course, no problem! By default, zsh does not have the ^r shortcut for reverse history search (you can reproduce it by executing zsh -f and trying!). We add it here, but if you run bindkey -v after loading oh-my-zsh.sh you override all key-bindings. You can reproduce this by executing in a clean ohmyzsh installation (with no bindkey calls):

bindkey | grep '\^Xr' # you'll see an entry
bindkey -v # set viins keymap
bindkey | grep '\^Xr' # no entry anymore

By adding the vi-mode plugin, you get the bindkey -v executed but maintain all the good stuff like the ^r keymap.
I hope this explanation fulfils your doubts!

[tmel173]

That explains why other shortcut keys were also broken ! Thanks a lot for the explanation !

[rwmitchell]

more importantly, OMZ sets bindkey to emacs mode in the startup code, overriding anything you may have already set. vi-mode sets it back to vi. zsh already defaults to emacs mode, OMZ should not be setting it in the startup.

[tmel173]

not sure what happened but I am facing a new issue with something a little interesting where my <ctrl + r> only works as root. I do notice thats also affecting my ssh only working with root on remote servers. I don't mind that later part working for that part but its the <ctrl + r> bothering me. I was thinking of opening a new ticket but it seems tied to this issue. I'm happy to open a new ticket if that helps