reverse-i-search function in bash is one of my favorite. I could easily search more specificly through comands I was running. But noticed that on some machine than I press ctrl + s it doesn’t work
In many terminals, is used by default to send the pause transmission code (XOF).
To get that functionality back change the binding or just disable XOF, by adding that command into ~/.basrc file
stty -ixon
after source ~/.basrc forward and reverse search is back.
Source: Linux reverse-i-search function unable to forward search