One thing I find life-changing is to remap the up arrow so that it does not iterates through all commands, but only those starting with the characters I have already written. So e.g. I can type `tar -`, then the up arrow, and get the tar parameters that worked last time.
In zsh this is configured with
bindkey "^[OA" up-line-or-beginning-search # Up
bindkey "^[OB" down-line-or-beginning-search # Down
In zsh this is configured with