Currently, Zsh’s extended_history option is not handled well in Emacs. The comint buffer does not know to skip it when running comint-read-input-ring. The attached patch handles this. This behavior is described in the Zsh manual available at: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Options.html#History The format of this line looks like this: : :; This patch just skips those timestamp to get the part.