TL,DR: add “unsetopt share_history” to your .zshrc file

I’ve been using Oh My Zsh at work for a few months. As far as terminal config managers go, this one works pretty well. But the default configuration does include something which I found quite annoying.

First, a few words on how I use the terminal. I’m in the terminal constantly in my day to day. At the start of the day, I’m creating terminal tabs and running commands to do things like build the project I’m working on, start a testing session, etc. This all starts very ad-hoc, but over time these tabs take on a particular role. I may run make and git in the left-most tab, run tests in the tab next to that, have logs tailing in the one after that, etc. As I start and stop commands in each tab, they all build up a different history, which is usually visible in the terminal output itself. Eventually it comes to the point where in order to run a particular tool, I simply need to switch to the particular tab and press ↑ one or two times to get to it.

Installing Oh My Zsh broke this workflow. Out of the box Oh My Zsh enables shared command history across each session, meaning that the commands recalled when pressing ↑ are the last commands executed in any tab. This meant that when going through the history, the recalled command would be different from the ones that I’ve entered in the tab I’m in. In addition to this resulting in pressing ↑ way more times than I used to — sometimes to the point where I gave up and simply typed the command out again — it also meant that the recalled commands differ from the ones I saw in the tab output itself. This was very jarring.

Fortunately, this feature can be turned off simply by adding the following to your .zshrc file.

unsetopt share_history

I did just this and my old workflow was restored.

I don’t know why shared command history was chosen as the default. Am I in the minority using the terminal this way? Maybe. But I know for certain that this group is larger than a single person. In either case, I’m glad that I was able to disable this “feature”.