Heh. Sorry for not reading your first posting thoroughly enough.
From the zshcontrib(1) manual:
up-line-or-beginning-search, down-line-or-beginning-search These widgets are similar to the builtin functions up-line-or-search and down-line-or-search: if in a multiline buffer they move up or down within the buffer, otherwise they search for a history line matching the start of the current line. In this case, however, they search for a line which matches the current line up to the current cursor position, in the manner of history-beginning-search-backward and -forward, rather than the first word on the line.
So, you'd probably need something along the lines of this:
autoload -Uz up-line-or-beginning-search autoload -Uz down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey '\eOA' up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey '\e[A' up-line-or-beginning-search bindkey '\eOB' down-line-or-beginning-search bindkey '\e[B' down-line-or-beginning-search
OK! I placed those 6 lines in my ~/.zshrc.local and resourced the config file. The key mapping seems intact:
% bindkey '"^[[A" up-line-or-beginning-search
But if I attempt to use the uparrow now, I get:
% vim ~/ :( No such widget `up-line-or-beginning-search'
You thoughts are welcomed and thank you.