Currently when interacting with the history it lists the actions from oldest to newest causing the most recent/current actions to be listed last at the bottom of the screen and as far away from the things like search/undo/extract:
If the order was the reverse, the current and most recent actions would end up being closer to relevant elements(search/undo/extract):
As a "bonus" it would also make keyboard navigation more natural.
Thoughts?
My preference is for the current recent at bottom, top-down like a ledger getting filled on paper. But sure maybe you could add a reverse sort arrow button with hover text that would also save the preference key for maintaining the user’s preferences through restarting OpenRefine.
But sure maybe you could add a reverse sort arrow button with hover text that would also save the preference key for maintaining the user’s preferences through restarting OpenRefine.
Given my primary goal of making it keyboard accessible it would only make things more complicated, and I think it's much better to improve the defaults over adding customization.
I will probably pass on keyboard accessibility for the history list for now, maybe when there is resources available the above is something that could be UX tested properly.
If I remember correctly, the history direction was accidentally reversed some years ago (in the 2.8 release maybe?) and then we put it back to the current direction (oldest entries on top). I am not sure if this was motivated by particular design considerations or just the impulse to preserve the status quo which had been changed unintentionally.
We could consider making the direction locale-specific (depending on whether the language is written top to bottom or bottom to top)… but I assume you are using a top to bottom language and it would not fit your bill! 
The history lists isn't for us a part of the UI which would be "supercharged" by good keyboard accessibility(compared to for example modals and cells) as it's not central to our workflows, so I don't have much of an issue with the status quo. If someone on my end really wants it I could just have the change downstream.
