hey @ellie thanks for your comment - nothing better than another clever engineer to rubber duck and make us figure out what’s going on!
honestly, i shouldve done that in the first place but just posted the relevant bits and i completely forgot i wanted to isolate my zsh to its very minimum possible config… and after doing that and commenting out half of everything i managed to find the culprit!!
well i’m not sure it still makes sense keeping in this thread, or in a different one; but still ill document it here so if anyone else is facing the same situation i might be able to help:
in my case the incompatibility comes from another plugin i use here GitHub - jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode: 💻 A better and friendly vi(vim) mode plugin for ZSH. so i can have vi features in zsh; disabling it works like a charm and i also found that basically in INSERT mode if I use ctrl+r it goes to backwards interactive search, and in NORMAL mode it triggers properly atuin’s search as expected.
do you think it’s valid to explore and document somewhere? happy to provide more info if necessary as well (i believe it’s prob more of a user’s problem knowing how to configure other plugins and ill try to suss it out myself, if i find sth to maybe override the keybind in INSERT mode i update here anyway)