zsh-nix-shell VS zsh-history-substring-search

This one is really good, it has a lot of hacks to translate bash features used by Nix into zsh.

nix-shell : ⌛ - Plugin that lets you use ZSH as the default shell in a nix-shell environment.

How does this differ from https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search ? Except that yours seems to be built-in and zsh-history-substring-search is ~800 lines of zsh

git clone --depth 1 "https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search" $HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/zsh-history-substring-search

Agreed, but also https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search for me.

I can't life without this one anymore

It is the feature of fish shell, which is also ported to zsh via zsh-history-substring-search plugin.

zsh-history-substring-search: This is a clean-room implementation of the Fish shell's history search feature, where you can type in any part of any command from history and then press chosen keys, such as the UP and DOWN arrows, to cycle through matches.

In most shells, you can make use of Ctrl+R to perform backwards search through your history. After pressing Ctrl+R, you can type a substring you want to match for commands in your history. As you keep pressing it, you will cycle through the matches in your history. This can also be enabled with the UP/DOWN arrows in zsh.

That doesn't have the same behavior as fish. This plugin does: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

zsh-history-substring-search allows you to do the same thing in zsh

In that case, history substring search can come in handy.

if you're going to use a fork of zdharma's work, this one might be better https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search (maintained by a group)