I use fish with one plugin - fzf.fish. It's invaluable to me and the shortcuts are second nature now.

It prefixes each line with a timestamp rather than a number, which makes most sense to me.

https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish?tab=readme-ov-file#-se...

The fish version of history search doesn't just do a simple substring search like in bash. It's already more powerful by doing a subsequence search. See https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9476

I don’t think anyone that uses fish uses ctrl+r. You just start typing and you get (directory aware) history based completions.

So you have to remember the directory you were in when you ran a one-off task six months ago?

fish suggests commands as you type, shown as faded text after the cursor. But suggestions aren't replacements for history search. Only one suggestion is shown at a time, and you don't have much control over what is shown.

It's popular though, so it's also available in zsh through the autosuggestions plugin.

Right, but OP was suggesting that fish didn’t need history search because of.