Personally I've bound history searches to the up/down arrow to make bash behave more like the C-shell in this regard: "\e[A": history-search-backward "

Personally I've bound history searches to the up/down arrow to make bash behave more like the C-shell in this regard: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward (This was really the only thing I disliked about bash compared to csh, so imagine my delight when I found out this option existed in readline.)