Nslookup under osx is tricky to use interactively as it doesn’t support readline. When you try to use the command history you get the following:

> ^[[A

Argh! This means more typing. As far as I can remember it has always returned ^[[A or ^[[B depending on the arrow key used. After a bit of research it seems you can fix it with rlwrap which you can install via mac ports. To use it just wrapper nslookup in rlwrap:

rlwrap nslookup

This should enable the history in nslookup and reduce the amount of typing, when you need to go back. For ease set up an alias in your .bash_profile:

alias ns="rlwrap nslookup"

Now typing ns gives you an interactive ready nslookup. Clearly, you could use dig or host but some habits are hard to shake.