Ars Technica article on FreeBSD new user experience

[Enji Cooper]

> On Apr 10, 2020, at 5:46 PM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> 
> Kyle Evans wrote this message on Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 09:49 -0500:

…

>> My memory here is incredibly hazy, it may be that I was scarred by
>> history not persisting at all across sessions or something like this;
>> I quickly installed zsh and never looked back.
> 
> Yeah, history isn't kept by default, not sure if there's an option to
> keep it, if there is, I don't see it in the man page, and ctrl-r doesn't
> work either.

	There is history support, but it’s not on by default and it’s not spelled the same way as other shells (I don’t think it’s persistent between shell invocations, however):

             The following variables affect the execution of fc:

             FCEDIT        Name of the editor to use for history editing.

             HISTSIZE      The number of previous commands that are
                           accessible.


	Given that the only other base system shell option is csh, I opt out of both and always install bash (I haven’t quite jumped on the zsh train yet).
Thanks,
-Enji