Increasing Vim’s Command History

If you type :set history, you'll see the number of : entires that will be stored. The default is 20, which is what my Vim is set to. However, you can easily set it to anything: I've seen vimrc files on GitHub with it set to 10000.

History includes previous search patterns as well as command-line entries. These are written to the .viminfo file. You can change which file Vim reads for .viminfo by using the -i switch when starting Vim, and if you use -i NONE you can start Vim without a viminfo file, which can be useful if you're trying to work out strange behaviour between sessions, or if Vim is starting up slowly.

These days disks are fast enough that a large viminfo shouldn’t cause much of a slowdown, so you may find it useful to increase 'history' beyond the default of 20.