I use Atuin, but unlike the author actually find it more valuable since I use it across many machines. I have 7 different machines (of various make and OS though all *NIX) in my house right now that I regularly SSH in to or use directly, and Atuin's sync keeps my history on all of them. If I want to narrow down by host I can still do that. I also keep similar directory structures so I can narrow down by directory even if I performed a command on a different machine most of the time.

That said, some form of advanced history search is a game changer, no matter how you get it. It's one of those "can't understand how I lived without it" things once you get it going.

I love fzf but no need to invent the wheel here if you are using zsh. check out one of these zle plugins. (Demo https://asciinema.org/a/155704)

I prefer these two, you get good performance, search that is semi-shell syntax aware, ranking that takes age somewhat into account, and syntax hilighting.

https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/history-search-multi-wo... with https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlightin...

or the same thing but older, for those who like older things because they have an air of stability about them: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

I've been using McFly [1] recently, and like it a lot.

> McFly replaces your default ctrl-r shell history search with an intelligent search engine that takes into account your working directory and the context of recently executed commands. McFly's suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.

[1] https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

this sort of topic illustrates the type of vexing problems that I wish a community model was better at addressing. Chasing and solving your own pain points is cool but frequently creates new pain points for other people. I love more features for searching history, but...

the reason bash uses Ctrl-r for searching back in history is because that's EMACS for searching back in your edit buffer (like C-a, C-f, C-b, C-e, etc are emacs cursor motions). I like the features of fzf, but I hate that it suddenly changes muscle memory that I rely on that is bigger than the immediate context.

these kinds of problems show up all over. I have always relied heavily on "middle button pastes the current mouse selection". I don't know what's going on in linux--is it Wayland?--but that feature is increasingly and increasingly being broken in more and more places. one place (which may entail a different "feature creep") is "click the url-bar in the browser and it auto-selects the whole thing...uh uh uh, wait, but not anymore for the purposes of the X-selection. but you can get the X-selection back if you click again (to deselect the whole thing) then again to reselect the whole thing... or is it double click..." the mind boggles

the old way (or goal) was to have the UI be standard, everywhere used the same code. but there were always people who wanted to innovate on their own, then with the idea of UX it wasn't any longer about standardization--or ironically personalization--at all

I realize whoever are making these changes simply don't work the way I have (for the last 35 yrs (well, that's just with linux)) so they don't notice what's being thrown away. I guess it's getting close to that time I should climb on and drift away on a little ice raft...

I use zsh-histdb, and it's amazing. It shows return statuses and which directory the command was run from.

I honestly can't remember the entire setup, but my dotfiles that have the setup are here: https://github.com/Hobadee/dotfiles/blob/master/Common/profi...

> The network aspects of Atuin also gave me the heebie-jeebies. Reasonable people can differ on such matters.

The networking stuff can be fully compiled out of Atuin. The client and sync feature flags[1] control this, and it's fairly trivial to confirm that the networking crate (reqwest) is only enabled when the sync feature is enabled.[2]

Atuin can also be configured to only talk to your own sync server rather than the Atuin run server, and the history is e2e encrypted, so :shrug:. There's enough good engineering there that I'd not put it as particularly high on my list of security risks.

[1]: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/blob/e8df3d168e7fb9d6f99d97...

[2]: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/blob/e8df3d168e7fb9d6f99d97...

> I’m also not sure the ‘fuzzy’ aspects of Atuin quite match the heights of fzf/skim).

This. I've been using atuin for a few months and this is so horrible how much better it could be with a "real" fzf matching... I just tried skim shell integration ( https://github.com/skim-rs/skim/tree/master/shell ) and it's great. I kind of like the extra metadata atuin saves (cwd, session context), but I think I was just waiting to stumble into this to turn atuin back off...

Personnally I use bash, so I made so my history is eternal (as is the content never get deleted) and I use FZF_CTRL_R_OPTS to customize the ctrl-r of fzf.

Also the history is reloaded after each command so if I type multiple commands in a tmux pane x, and then go to another tmux pane y I just have to type something (just press the enter key) in pane y and I have the full history of what happened in pane x.

Here is how to do it, just add the following to your .bashrc for the eternal history :

```

  export HISTFILESIZE=
  export HISTSIZE=
  export HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%F %T] "
  export HISTFILE=~/.bash_eternal_history
  export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
  shopt -s histappend
  shopt -s checkwinsize
  filtered_history_save() {
      local last_command=$(history 1 | awk '{print $4}')
      # Don't store some commands in the history.
      if [[ ! "$last_command" =~ (mpv|pass|yt-dlp|wtwitch) ]]; then
          history -a
      fi
      history -c
      history -r
  }
  export PROMPT_COMMAND="filtered_history_save; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

  # Sources :
  # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9457233/unlimited-bash-history
  # http://superuser.com/questions/575479/bash-history-truncated-to-500-lines-on-each-login
  # http://superuser.com/questions/20900/bash-history-loss

And for the custom fzf ctrl-r :

```

  # Source fzf (should already be here if fzf is installed)
  if [ -f /usr/share/fzf/completion.bash ]; then
    . /usr/share/fzf/completion.bash
  fi

  if [ -f /usr/share/fzf/key-bindings.bash ]; then
    . /usr/share/fzf/key-bindings.bash
  fi


  # Customize ctrl-r
  export FZF_CTRL_R_OPTS="
    --preview 'echo {2..} | bat --color=always -pl sh'
    --preview-window right:wrap
    --bind 'ctrl-/:toggle-preview'
    --bind 'ctrl-t:track+clear-query'
    --bind 'ctrl-y:execute-silent(echo -n {2..} | pbcopy)+abort'
    --color header:italic
    --header 'Press CTRL-Y to copy command into clipboard'"

If you install atuin to give it a try, be careful to backup your history first. I installed it once and it deleted all my zsh history for some reason. I've rarely been more aware of how much I rely on my history to get things done.

Also it made atuin useless to me since I didn't have a history anymore so couldn't even try it properly.

> and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the previous command.

Well. I prefer ctrl-p personally, but I take your point:)

A fish version: https://gist.github.com/philocalyst/b2d764d694e63bc4c5143735...

It goes from the latest command down by default which isn't exactly the desired behavior but hesitated to add any other commands! I'm sure there is an option to reverse the order for a cli I'm already using but I couldn't find it in a cursory search :(

Feedback/commits appreciated.

> What does 5408 mean and why is it taking up valuable screen space?

For anyone who's not familiar with something as basic as the history command, please pick up a book on bash/zsh/sh and take the time to learn.

If you don't know how to use the shell, you will struggle with (or simply be unable to perform) many basic tasks that could be accomplished quickly and easily by someone who's taken the time to learn how to use the shell and a handful of basic tools like grep, sed, awk, etc.

I usually only care about commands from the same session, but sometimes I need to delve into the global history. With the default bash setup on most distros, the history log isn't updated until the shell terminates--leaving the "global" history incomplete until the other shells terminate. That is, I can lookup history from "dead" shells, but not from "living" ones.

I think shell history would be more practical if it appended to the history log after each command (rather than at the end of the session), and tagged each line with some form of "session ID"--allowing us to distinguish between "local" and "global" history.

You can force a flush to the log "as-is" with things like prompt overrides, but that's an all-or-nothing solution, saddling us with history from foreign shells even when we don't want it. Adding a session ID to the history log, and another flag to the built-in "history" command (to toggle between local and global history), would be a worthwhile improvement.

I have a similar setup. I use fzf plus a unique shared history that is 10000 items long. Last time I moved machines one of the important things to take over was my shell history. I have old obscure invocations that I can‘t remember but know that I did them in the past ;) Unique is the key for me. I don‘t care that I ran cargo test 20 times in a row. Shared history across shells is a bit polarizing depending on your workflow. For me it’s important to have access to the items I ran in a different window/tab. But what I can‘t understand is why so many paid professionals stick to the defaults. I shows my setup a few people and they all went: „what ?!? That is possible“ And that is the end of it. Well most devs I know sadly don‘t even know how to use the default search. The fact that you have to hit CTRL-R multiple times to skip to the next search result is a mystery. Maybe someone needs to package a shell where this kinds of options are just the default. And maybe adds a more modern key binding interface.

I've been using Eli Bandersky Persistent History in Bash since more than 10+ years ago [1]. It's definitely given the biggest productivity boost when using the shell. There's definitely newer solutions, but as the old adage goes if it aint broke don't fix it (and for the same reason I use bash because I know most of the quirks). The only addition is adding the fzf reverse history search for my current session.

[1]: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...

Ctrl-R and sorting by time since the last run is nice, but odds are you run the same commands again and again WITHIN the context provided by the current directory, so the cwd should be kept

Another important parameter is the number of successful runs: if you successfully ran the same command in the same directory 30 times in the last 30 days, it may be more useful that the one you have only run 1 time yesterday, so the exit value (like `false ;echo $?`) is another thing to keep

I have 2 bash shortcuts: one for a context-free search (Ctrl-T), while the default (Ctrl-R) is restricted to the current directory, and I throw everything (cwd, start time, stop time, exit value...) in a sqlite database to do more advanced queries (ex: on average, at which hour do I make more mistakes?)

What I'd really like is integration between fzf and bash autocompletion so that I can get more of a code completion like experience. Or maybe something smarter still. I feel I could get so much more value from kubectl and/or yq with a bit better ux in this regard.

Maybe skim does this? Or fzf does it if I configure it differently?

Ah, found this now, looks really promising! https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab (Oh, zsh specific)

No one using hstr? I'm a big fan of that one, though i must admit i haven't used much else other than bash's reverse history search.

At $WORK most of the machines are running KSH and I ended getting used to the vi shortcuts rather than the Emacs style, so I have also turned to it on my personal computers. Just append `set -o vi` to the user .profile or .bashrc file, and then you can use all of the vi key commands: /|? for searching, n to search previous results, etc.

> but I’ll often run a tiny subset of those commands (e.g. cargo test) hundreds of time in a single day.

Bacon replaces that command entirely for me (and many other cargo commands which would otherwise be run repetitively). https://dystroy.org/bacon/

I lately started using copilot with eclipse I was surprise how copilot started creating complete functions for me inferring what I was trying to do. fzf could benefit of that. If I do:

make ./run_program

fzf could create a line for after I do the sam e sequence 3 times that goes:

make && ./run_program

That would be cool.

Things I'd like added to my command history:

- where it was executed

- If it failed

- stickies/favourites

I personally find ctrl-r does everything I want it to do, though I'm working with UUIDs a lot of the time which makes things easier I'm sure.

I tried various things, but keep coming back to zsh/fzf. Now I want fuzzy searching everywhere.

LaTeX returns .tex file compilation bugs as .log files when using pdflatex [filename.tex] Is synthetic format prior to redirection and concatenating. Whether using /.bashrc/ or saved in local directories, when debugging is typically resolved with querying X: quit or H: help.

For non-fuzzy options:

I've found bash's history-search-backward and history-search-forward very useful. They complete commands that begin with what you have typed. I have them mapped to M-p and M-n.

I also find myself using bash's insert-last-argument command, which can be repeated to fill in the last argument of previous commands. I have it mapped to M-_.

Another feature I've been using is the dabbrev-expand function, which xterm (and some other terminals) have. This allows string matching on the terminal output including the scroll buffer. It's useful for forming a new command that uses previous arguments that are not last arguments, or that are outputs of previous commands. I have it mapped to M-/. I've tweaked the matching algorithm on my local xterm to allow tokens enclosed in quotes or braces (which programs often output) to be matched (xterm by default only considers non-whitespace).

I have `h` aliased to `history | fzf`, works well enough

ctrl+r with fzf and zoxide for quick dir jumping is all I need in the shell nowadays.

ctrl + r is the neatest trick, I think I heard about it from EmbeddedFM

ReSH or McFly does the job.

Wat?

  > fzf --zsh
  unknown option: --zsh

[dead]

Bro, just use fish shell. They have done all the heavy lifting for you.