Why do Windows consoles lose command-line history (up arrow) after a time?

Question

It seems random: after some amount of time / usage of any console I use on Windows Vista, I lose the ability to use the command-line history (or command buffer, if you prefer...), and hitting the up or down arrow no longer does anything at all, meaning there are essentially 0 items available in the history.

I've seen this behavior in Cygwin, CMD, and PowerShell.

Sometimes this behavior applies to processes running inside the console - Python, MySQL client, etc.

Is this an inherent problem in Windows? A setting somewhere? Are there other consoles that don't have this problem?

ps - if you think this is non-programming related, please see other questions regarding programming tools, for instance, nearly anything tagged "eclipse" which deal with how to use the IDE rather than programming for it.

Answer 1

Two ways, I think.

1) Far Manager is a good choice for a shell. Even if you don't need it's all power (file/archive management, editor, huge number of plugins, macros), you can use it as a wrapper/executor for cmd, tcc, sh or any other program, shell or command processor.

For example

• take 3 files from distrib (Far2 or Far3): far.exe, fareng.lng and (optionally) fareng.hlp
• run "far.exe /w", press Ctrl+B Ctrl+O
• type any command in command line: dir, set, notepad, putty, an so on...

History will be preserved between sessions, you may access it by Alt+F8 (press Ctrl+Alt+F to switch history into filter mode).

Far 2.0 stores history (and settings) in the registry.

Far 3.0 stores history in SQLite database, and may be portable.

Also, Far can autocomplete commands from history or files/paths from disk. And there is plugin (YAC) which can autocomplete from aliases and so on...

2) I have found recently interesting project: Clink - Bringing Bash's powerful command line editing to Microsoft Windows' cmd.exe

• Powerful Bash-like line editing from GNU's Readline library. Read more on Readline's keyboard shortcuts.
• Superior path completion (TAB).
• Paste from clipboard (Ctrl-V).
• Support for the completion of executables/commands, and environment variables.
• Undo/Redo (Ctrl-_ or Ctrl-X, Ctrl-U)
• Improved command line history.
  • Persists across sessions.
  • Searchable (Ctrl-R and Ctrl-S).
  • History expansion (e.g. !!, !, and !$).
• Scriptable completion using Lua.

It seems a young but budding project, so I had created an option for use it in my Console Emulator.