8 ms·

I love fuzzy shell history. Game changer in terms of shell productivity. I use atuin[0] instead of fzf as I find the experience a bit nicer and it has history

I love fuzzy shell history. Game changer in terms of shell productivity. I use atuin[0] instead of fzf as I find the experience a bit nicer and it has history backups built in (disclaimer, I am a maintainer) Some of our users still prefer fzf because they are used to how it fuzzy finds, but we're running an experiment with skim[1] which allows us to embed the fuzzy engine without much overhead - hopefully giving them back that fzf-like experience [0]: https://github.com/ellie/atuin https://github.com/ellie/atuin [1]: https://github.com/lotabout/skim https://github.com/lotabout/skim

nidnogg 4y ago
Thanks for the atuin reminder, I knew fzf reminded me of a crate I had on my backlog to try out but I completely forgot the name. I should probably just get to it now.
noroot 4y ago
I wanted to like atuin. The idea is great. But it just could not match the instant search that ctrl-r with fzf offers sadly. There is always a noticeable delay that annoyed me and made me revert back to fzf for search. For me another issue was that I needed to do more keystrokes for the same behaviour (search a previously ran command and execute it). Fuzzy shell history search is just one of those mind-blowing things. I love my history, it's such a trove and I can trust it to work as some kind of external memory (it's enough to vaguely know the kubectl command, or that I want to "du -h | sort" to see what is using disk space, etc).
- psYchotic 4y ago
  I also had a rather noticeable delay when launching atuin. As it turns out, this was because it checked for an update every time it launched! You can disable that update check: add a ` update_check = false` to your `~/.config/atuin/config.toml` [1]. That made the delay pretty much disappear for me. [1]: https://atuin.sh/docs/config/#update_check https://atuin.sh/docs/config/#update_check
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    What? I don't expect any tool to interact with the network if it's not made specifically for this (curl, netcat, etc). This would betray my expectations, I find it unacceptable.
    - conradludgate 4y ago
      It's one of our key features > backup and sync encrypted shell history But it's up to you. You can disable any sync features by installing with `--no-default-features --features client` set. Your application won't have any networking features built into the binary then
  - conradludgate 4y ago
    We actually fixed the delay issue, but since you disabled update checking you wouldn't have known to update! It was quite annoying so we're sorry for that
    - pmarreck 4y ago
      How would you compare this to, say, McFly? https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly
      - conradludgate 4y ago
        Not too different. * We use heuristic based searches whereas mcfly trains a neural network * We offer a sync functionality to share history on multiple machines mcfly is a great project, although they are looking for new maintainers apparently!
      - reddit_clone 4y ago
        Intrigued by local-directory-first feature of McFly (It brings up commands you previously executed in that folder first). I tried it for a bit. But there was noticeable lag compared to FZF and also the UI was a bit shaky. Went back to FZF (in Zsh). I have a seven year zsh history. That may be a contributing factor for the issues ?
- conradludgate 4y ago
  As I put in a child reply, that delay should be fixed. But if you can't get past the double-enter, then I understand. I think there was some work to fix that, I'll check up on it. Thanks for the reminder
- nikvdp 4y ago
  Same, I enjoyed atuin but found myself missing fzf's fuzzy search experience so I ported fzf's own ctrl-r zsh widget to read from atuin instead of the shell's history to solve this. Best of both worlds imo, you get fzf's fuzzy search experience and speed with atuin's shell history management and syncing functionality. Zsh snippet below in case it's helpful to anybody. With this in your .zshrc ctrl-r will search your shell history with fzf+atuin and ctrl-e will bring up atuin's own fuzzy finder in case you still want it. It only searches the last 5000 entries of your atuin history for speed, but you can tweak ATUIN_LIMIT to your desired value if that's not optimal. atuin-setup() { if ! which atuin &> /dev/null; then return 1; fi bindkey '^E' _atuin_search_widget export ATUIN_NOBIND="true" eval "$(atuin init "$CUR_SHELL")" fzf-atuin-history-widget() { local selected num setopt localoptions noglobsubst noposixbuiltins pipefail no_aliases 2>/dev/null # local atuin_opts="--cmd-only --limit ${ATUIN_LIMIT:-5000}" local atuin_opts="--cmd-only" local fzf_opts=( --height=${FZF_TMUX_HEIGHT:-80%} --tac "-n2..,.." --tiebreak=index "--query=${LBUFFER}" "+m" "--bind=ctrl-d:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts -c $PWD),ctrl-r:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts)" ) selected=$( eval "atuin search ${atuin_opts}" | fzf "${fzf_opts[@]}" ) local ret=$? if [ -n "$selected" ]; then # the += lets it insert at current pos instead of replacing LBUFFER+="${selected}" fi zle reset-prompt return $ret } zle -N fzf-atuin-history-widget bindkey '^R' fzf-atuin-history-widget } atuin-setup
  - rofrol 4y ago
    Thanks, just needed to set `CUR_SHELL=zsh` to make it work. Also `brew install atuin fzf`
nathanwh 4y ago
Something I've always wanted from my shell history is to be able to record relative filepaths as their absolute equivalent in the history, is that supported in atuin?. If you do a lot of data munging on the CLI, you end up with a lot of commands like `jq 'complicated_selector' data.json`, which if I want to remember the selector is good, but if I want to remember which data I ran it on is not so good. I could do it with better filenames but that would involve thinking ahead. I also run into this a lot trying to remember exactly which local file has been uploaded to s3 by looking at shell history.
- ryanianian 4y ago
  File paths are just strings from the shell, though, and each tool can handle relative paths differently. So `./` can mean relative to your shell's cwd or the program could interpret it as relative to something else. Moreover something like `go test -v ./...` is...ambiguous. I think what would be more useful is to record `env` or some similar context along with the time and command. That would probably get weird pretty fast, though. Maybe just a thing that could insert some useful bookmarking/state into the history record on-demand? `history-set-checkpoint` or something would save your pwd and local vars or something.
- conradludgate 4y ago
  Technically. For every command you run, atuin stores the current directory, the time, the duration, the exit code, a session id and your user/host name. With the current directory you should be able to get the absolute path from your relative paths
- asdff 4y ago
  Issues like this are why I write everything into scripts and pipelines, even the munging. This way everything is documented: the environment, the input, the output, the log file, what ran, and longform comments with why I was doing it.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    Good choice but that for me breaks the "carpe Diem" part of the inspiration that can go away in a whim, that it's what I have when I'm writing (complex) one liners in the shell. Or maybe I'm just lazy.
tasuki 4y ago
I love fzf because it's so much more than a shell history explorer!
totetsu 4y ago
Fuzzy find would have been great with discworld mud
pmarreck 4y ago
I'm a fan of McFly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly
xxxtentachyon 4y ago
If that's your use case, here's another game changer (one line bashrc change to make bash_history changes immediately, rather than upon shell exit, e.g. when you end your tmux session): https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberick.com/2008/11/update-bash-history-in-realtime.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberi...
- drekipus 4y ago
  Oh wow thank you for this.
- CuteDepravity 4y ago
  Meta question : do you keep the archive.org link of the article in your favorite or did you manually look up the link before posting? Or maybe an extension that does that automatically?
- yesenadam 4y ago
  Thank you!! Why on earth isn't that the default. It always seemed weird that with multiple bash windows open, the commands from most of them weren't added to the history.
  - noxvilleza 4y ago
    My guesses are that it's on-close so you can follow the per-shell history slightly easier (rather than it being interleaved from multiple shells?), or reducing disk writes?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      They don’t interlace which can be nice
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    I often have three or more terminals open, doing different tasks in each; I also often have cycles of work where I'll repeat the last three commands again (three up-arrows and a return). This breaks if one terminal's commands get inserted into another terminal's history.
larschdk 4y ago
Fuzzy history is nice, but the real game changer for me was the ability to pretty much stop remembering paths in big projects. The default keybindings provide the Ctrl-T shortcut to insert a path/filename on the command line using fuzzy search and Alt-C to fuzzy-cd. No more tedious completion - just search + enter.
- snowe2010 4y ago
  I just use fzf-marks. Then I can fuzzy cd the only directories that ever matter to me.
- reddit_clone 4y ago
  Same thing with Emacs with Projectile. I can't believe people still using a tree view of a deeply nested project and clicking though directories and finally finding a file. I am not willing to type more than a few characters for any file in the project. Fuzzy finding with quick narrowing FTW.
  - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
    I've seen a number of projects with hundreds of "index.js" files.
    - hectormalot 4y ago
      fzf includes the path in your match. So, unless the directories also have unpractical names, this typically won’t be a problem. Learning for me: Brew suggests to install the shortcuts but doesn’t automatically do this. Just activated this and Ctrl-R is a big improvement this way.
    - reddit_clone 4y ago
      So you type a few more characters and narrow it down. Space separated snippets will match any part of the path.
  - nickysielicki 4y ago
    What I really want is orderless[1] searching of my vterm shell history. That would be a game changer. https://github.com/oantolin/orderless https://github.com/oantolin/orderless
mustache_kimono 4y ago
FYI, speaking as a skim library user/lover, two things -- 1) it's really not maintained, and 2) once you dig into the code it gets a little gnarly. I have a branch[0] where I'm trying to do things like reduce the user perceptible lag in search, the initial time of ingest, and add small features I need, etc (all done). I've tried to create PRs where I can, and they go unnoticed and unused. One other thing I was trying to get a handle on is memory usage. The issue is -- you're implicitly creating objects with static lifetimes everywhere. Now try to refactor that, and there is a trait object held in a struct which depends on another trait object, so good luck figuring out the lifetimes. This is totally fine for a fuzzy finder tool, probably, but less fine when you drop a fuzzy find feature it into an app. Love to have others interested in skim, and eager to work with anyone with big ideas about how to make it better. I'll have to try out atuin! [0]: https://github.com/kimono-koans/two_percent https://github.com/kimono-koans/two_percent
- sfc32 4y ago
  > it's really not maintained What do you mean by maintained? There are commits as recent as yesterday on the project: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  - detaro 4y ago
    They are clearly not talking about fzf
- deroanth 4y ago
  Was really trying to figure out why you would name a fork of a project that skims the filesystem two_percent. "What, is it invoked using %% or something? That seems unw... oh. Nice." Well done.
ar9av 4y ago
It's not only a zsh thing, works in bash too. I liked the way he covered just one function though, which at least might be starters for such operations, and are fully operational, and probably caters for better workflows for most, than without fzf. Funny thing: I try to stop using Ctrl-R from fzf at the moment, and rather use the one that ships with smenu.
_RafaelKr 4y ago
Thanks Conrad! That's really a huge game changer. I'm now using atuin for shell history and fzf for fuzzy completion[0], works awesome! As Shell I use zsh with some plugins managed via antigen on my Linux Mint default terminal. [0]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#fuzzy-completion-for-bash-and-zsh https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#fuzzy-completion-for-bash-an...

nidnogg 4y ago

Thanks for the atuin reminder, I knew fzf reminded me of a crate I had on my backlog to try out but I completely forgot the name. I should probably just get to it now.

noroot 4y ago

I wanted to like atuin. The idea is great. But it just could not match the instant search that ctrl-r with fzf offers sadly. There is always a noticeable delay that annoyed me and made me revert back to fzf for search. For me another issue was that I needed to do more keystrokes for the same behaviour (search a previously ran command and execute it). Fuzzy shell history search is just one of those mind-blowing things. I love my history, it's such a trove and I can trust it to work as some kind of external memory (it's enough to vaguely know the kubectl command, or that I want to "du -h | sort" to see what is using disk space, etc).

psYchotic 4y ago
I also had a rather noticeable delay when launching atuin. As it turns out, this was because it checked for an update every time it launched! You can disable that update check: add a ` update_check = false` to your `~/.config/atuin/config.toml` [1]. That made the delay pretty much disappear for me. [1]: https://atuin.sh/docs/config/#update_check https://atuin.sh/docs/config/#update_check
- MayeulC 4y ago
  What? I don't expect any tool to interact with the network if it's not made specifically for this (curl, netcat, etc). This would betray my expectations, I find it unacceptable.
  - conradludgate 4y ago
    It's one of our key features > backup and sync encrypted shell history But it's up to you. You can disable any sync features by installing with `--no-default-features --features client` set. Your application won't have any networking features built into the binary then
- conradludgate 4y ago
  We actually fixed the delay issue, but since you disabled update checking you wouldn't have known to update! It was quite annoying so we're sorry for that
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    How would you compare this to, say, McFly? https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly
    - conradludgate 4y ago
      Not too different. * We use heuristic based searches whereas mcfly trains a neural network * We offer a sync functionality to share history on multiple machines mcfly is a great project, although they are looking for new maintainers apparently!
    - reddit_clone 4y ago
      Intrigued by local-directory-first feature of McFly (It brings up commands you previously executed in that folder first). I tried it for a bit. But there was noticeable lag compared to FZF and also the UI was a bit shaky. Went back to FZF (in Zsh). I have a seven year zsh history. That may be a contributing factor for the issues ?
conradludgate 4y ago
As I put in a child reply, that delay should be fixed. But if you can't get past the double-enter, then I understand. I think there was some work to fix that, I'll check up on it. Thanks for the reminder
nikvdp 4y ago
Same, I enjoyed atuin but found myself missing fzf's fuzzy search experience so I ported fzf's own ctrl-r zsh widget to read from atuin instead of the shell's history to solve this. Best of both worlds imo, you get fzf's fuzzy search experience and speed with atuin's shell history management and syncing functionality. Zsh snippet below in case it's helpful to anybody. With this in your .zshrc ctrl-r will search your shell history with fzf+atuin and ctrl-e will bring up atuin's own fuzzy finder in case you still want it. It only searches the last 5000 entries of your atuin history for speed, but you can tweak ATUIN_LIMIT to your desired value if that's not optimal. atuin-setup() { if ! which atuin &> /dev/null; then return 1; fi bindkey '^E' _atuin_search_widget export ATUIN_NOBIND="true" eval "$(atuin init "$CUR_SHELL")" fzf-atuin-history-widget() { local selected num setopt localoptions noglobsubst noposixbuiltins pipefail no_aliases 2>/dev/null # local atuin_opts="--cmd-only --limit ${ATUIN_LIMIT:-5000}" local atuin_opts="--cmd-only" local fzf_opts=( --height=${FZF_TMUX_HEIGHT:-80%} --tac "-n2..,.." --tiebreak=index "--query=${LBUFFER}" "+m" "--bind=ctrl-d:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts -c $PWD),ctrl-r:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts)" ) selected=$( eval "atuin search ${atuin_opts}" | fzf "${fzf_opts[@]}" ) local ret=$? if [ -n "$selected" ]; then # the += lets it insert at current pos instead of replacing LBUFFER+="${selected}" fi zle reset-prompt return $ret } zle -N fzf-atuin-history-widget bindkey '^R' fzf-atuin-history-widget } atuin-setup
- rofrol 4y ago
  Thanks, just needed to set `CUR_SHELL=zsh` to make it work. Also `brew install atuin fzf`

nathanwh 4y ago

Something I've always wanted from my shell history is to be able to record relative filepaths as their absolute equivalent in the history, is that supported in atuin?. If you do a lot of data munging on the CLI, you end up with a lot of commands like `jq 'complicated_selector' data.json`, which if I want to remember the selector is good, but if I want to remember which data I ran it on is not so good. I could do it with better filenames but that would involve thinking ahead. I also run into this a lot trying to remember exactly which local file has been uploaded to s3 by looking at shell history.

ryanianian 4y ago
File paths are just strings from the shell, though, and each tool can handle relative paths differently. So `./` can mean relative to your shell's cwd or the program could interpret it as relative to something else. Moreover something like `go test -v ./...` is...ambiguous. I think what would be more useful is to record `env` or some similar context along with the time and command. That would probably get weird pretty fast, though. Maybe just a thing that could insert some useful bookmarking/state into the history record on-demand? `history-set-checkpoint` or something would save your pwd and local vars or something.
conradludgate 4y ago
Technically. For every command you run, atuin stores the current directory, the time, the duration, the exit code, a session id and your user/host name. With the current directory you should be able to get the absolute path from your relative paths
asdff 4y ago
Issues like this are why I write everything into scripts and pipelines, even the munging. This way everything is documented: the environment, the input, the output, the log file, what ran, and longform comments with why I was doing it.
- darkwater 4y ago
  Good choice but that for me breaks the "carpe Diem" part of the inspiration that can go away in a whim, that it's what I have when I'm writing (complex) one liners in the shell. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

tasuki 4y ago

I love fzf because it's so much more than a shell history explorer!

totetsu 4y ago

Fuzzy find would have been great with discworld mud

pmarreck 4y ago

I'm a fan of McFly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

xxxtentachyon 4y ago

If that's your use case, here's another game changer (one line bashrc change to make bash_history changes immediately, rather than upon shell exit, e.g. when you end your tmux session): https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberick.com/2008/11/update-bash-history-in-realtime.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberi...

drekipus 4y ago
Oh wow thank you for this.
CuteDepravity 4y ago
Meta question : do you keep the archive.org link of the article in your favorite or did you manually look up the link before posting? Or maybe an extension that does that automatically?
yesenadam 4y ago
Thank you!! Why on earth isn't that the default. It always seemed weird that with multiple bash windows open, the commands from most of them weren't added to the history.
- noxvilleza 4y ago
  My guesses are that it's on-close so you can follow the per-shell history slightly easier (rather than it being interleaved from multiple shells?), or reducing disk writes?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    They don’t interlace which can be nice
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  I often have three or more terminals open, doing different tasks in each; I also often have cycles of work where I'll repeat the last three commands again (three up-arrows and a return). This breaks if one terminal's commands get inserted into another terminal's history.

larschdk 4y ago

Fuzzy history is nice, but the real game changer for me was the ability to pretty much stop remembering paths in big projects. The default keybindings provide the Ctrl-T shortcut to insert a path/filename on the command line using fuzzy search and Alt-C to fuzzy-cd. No more tedious completion - just search + enter.

snowe2010 4y ago
I just use fzf-marks. Then I can fuzzy cd the only directories that ever matter to me.
reddit_clone 4y ago
Same thing with Emacs with Projectile. I can't believe people still using a tree view of a deeply nested project and clicking though directories and finally finding a file. I am not willing to type more than a few characters for any file in the project. Fuzzy finding with quick narrowing FTW.
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  I've seen a number of projects with hundreds of "index.js" files.
  - hectormalot 4y ago
    fzf includes the path in your match. So, unless the directories also have unpractical names, this typically won’t be a problem. Learning for me: Brew suggests to install the shortcuts but doesn’t automatically do this. Just activated this and Ctrl-R is a big improvement this way.
  - reddit_clone 4y ago
    So you type a few more characters and narrow it down. Space separated snippets will match any part of the path.
- nickysielicki 4y ago
  What I really want is orderless[1] searching of my vterm shell history. That would be a game changer. https://github.com/oantolin/orderless https://github.com/oantolin/orderless

mustache_kimono 4y ago

FYI, speaking as a skim library user/lover, two things -- 1) it's really not maintained, and 2) once you dig into the code it gets a little gnarly. I have a branch[0] where I'm trying to do things like reduce the user perceptible lag in search, the initial time of ingest, and add small features I need, etc (all done). I've tried to create PRs where I can, and they go unnoticed and unused. One other thing I was trying to get a handle on is memory usage. The issue is -- you're implicitly creating objects with static lifetimes everywhere. Now try to refactor that, and there is a trait object held in a struct which depends on another trait object, so good luck figuring out the lifetimes. This is totally fine for a fuzzy finder tool, probably, but less fine when you drop a fuzzy find feature it into an app. Love to have others interested in skim, and eager to work with anyone with big ideas about how to make it better. I'll have to try out atuin! [0]: https://github.com/kimono-koans/two_percent https://github.com/kimono-koans/two_percent

sfc32 4y ago
> it's really not maintained What do you mean by maintained? There are commits as recent as yesterday on the project: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
- detaro 4y ago
  They are clearly not talking about fzf
deroanth 4y ago
Was really trying to figure out why you would name a fork of a project that skims the filesystem two_percent. "What, is it invoked using %% or something? That seems unw... oh. Nice." Well done.

ar9av 4y ago

It's not only a zsh thing, works in bash too. I liked the way he covered just one function though, which at least might be starters for such operations, and are fully operational, and probably caters for better workflows for most, than without fzf. Funny thing: I try to stop using Ctrl-R from fzf at the moment, and rather use the one that ships with smenu.

_RafaelKr 4y ago

Thanks Conrad! That's really a huge game changer. I'm now using atuin for shell history and fzf for fuzzy completion[0], works awesome! As Shell I use zsh with some plugins managed via antigen on my Linux Mint default terminal. [0]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#fuzzy-completion-for-bash-and-zsh https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#fuzzy-completion-for-bash-an...