A rather annoying little thing with iTerm – it sends different escape characters than Terminal.app. I happen to bind readline’s history-search function to the up and down cursors. It didn’t work in iTerm.

Booooooooooooo.

Luckily, RTFM did the trick this time, and ‘man readline’ told me of an ever so nifty ‘if’ construct that allows both iTerm and Terminal.app to “Do the Right Thingâ„¢”

Here’s a snippet of my .inputrc that I know I’ll lose sometime in the future and be glad I stuck it in here:

"\C-[OA": history-search-backward # Bind the up arrow to history search, instead of history step...
"\C-[OB": history-search-forward
$if term=xterm
"\M-[A": history-search-backward # Bind the up arrow to history search, instead of history step...
"\M-[B": history-search-forward
$endif
# Ditto for down, type "x" [up] and it will look for the last x??? command