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I am very fond of bash's reverse-search-history (C-r) (command-line feature):

Search backward starting at the current line and moving ‘up’ through the history as necessary. This is an incremental search.

When I hit control-r in bash, I get the following:

(reverse-i-search)`':

And I am able to type characters of previously executed commands, honing in on what I am looking for. If I make a mistake, I can enter control-h to erase a character (equivalent of backspace).

This command-line functionality makes it extremely easy to refer to previously executed commands. I am wondering if such a capability exists for psql. I find it extremely inefficient to rely on just control-p and control-n.

For what it's worth, I am using PostgreSQL 9.3.1 on x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0, compiled by Apple LLVM version 5.0 (clang-500.2.79) (based on LLVM 3.3svn), 64-bit - obtained via Postgres.app.

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  • 4
    Have you tried Ctrl-r already? :)
    – dezso
    Apr 18, 2014 at 4:31
  • Of course, and it has no effect for me. Are you suggesting ctrl-r works for you??
    – user664833
    Apr 18, 2014 at 5:30
  • Use rlwrap...
    – Philᵀᴹ
    Apr 18, 2014 at 8:51
  • I installed rlwrap via homebrew (brew install rlwrap) and tried it out (rlwrap psql) - but control-r still does not work; in fact, it behaves in the exact same way as control-r without rlwrap (which is that nothing happens). Perhaps this is the sign of a deeper problem.
    – user664833
    Apr 18, 2014 at 16:31
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    ctrl-r is normally provided by the readline library. It appears there's an open issue for postgres.app about this. Apr 18, 2014 at 17:05

1 Answer 1

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A conversation about this on GitHub led to an interim "quick fix" solution:

open ~/.editrc and add:

bind "^R" em-inc-search-prev

Apparently the bigger issue is that PostgresApp uses libedit instead of libreadline. And supposedly libedit lacks some command-line features of libreadline, so until PostgresApp is compiled against libreadline, just use the above quick fix.

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  • Do you have to be in psql to use it? Aug 6, 2020 at 19:46

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