Like an elephant, many modern Unix shells tend to remember in great detail the copious amount of commands entered while working with them. As many others, zsh too boasts a history log and an even more convenient way of accessing each of its entries. Being able to glimpse at what you have been up to is not only practical from a work-log perspective, but also as a way to speed things up. Think about it; you could use history to see (and eventually edit) a previously typed command, get a bit of context as to what's going on with your system, or avoid retyping the same thing over and over. Being able to easily retrieve a command from the past sounds awesome, because it is indeed a really neat feature.

We'll now take a look at how to use zsh's history expansion to work with previous entries in the command line.