comment #1:

> Thanks for the proposal. I don't think it adds enough general value to add at this time.
>

Thanks Chet, I understand.

== Background==
Running history will output something like this:
$ history 5
 1004  man whatis
 1005  man builtin
 1006  ls /home
 1007  man apropos
 1008  history 5

With the command !1006 we can repeat the respective command.
Moreover, there is a some what equivalent repeat command: !-3

Idea

I think, it might be somewhat useful to have a switch to show the reversed counting of the history. For example like this:

$ history -5
   -5  man whatis
   -4  man builtin
   -3  ls /home
   -2  man apropos
   -1  history -5

This way, it becomes explicit what the reversed repeat, such as !-3 would mean.

Discussion

I understand this idea might be more eye candy than it is useful since the reversed repeat changes every time.
That's why I would like to ask the maintainers whether you see this as an acceptable change. If that is the case, i would work on a patch.

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After briefly glancing at the source code of the history command, i can see that the display function would require an additional flow path (a while loop for the reversed counting). The more involved part would be inserting an additional flag and argument parsing.