There's a variety of different things you can bind up-cursor to. It sounds like you want. bindkey '\e[A' history-beginning-search-backward Even better is the f

There's a variety of different things you can bind up-cursor to. It sounds like you want. bindkey '\e[A' history-beginning-search-backward Even better is the function in Functions/Zle/up-line-or-beginning-search To use that, you need to first do: autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search