An enhanced history(1) for bash

Robert T. McGibbon

Last update: Aug 25, 2022

Related tags

Command-line history

Overview

history

This is a replacement for the history builtin in bash.

It has a couple of additional features that relative to the one included with bash:

Consolidated shell command history from multiple terminals across multiple hosts. All history is stored in a single sqlite database. This is done without slowing down your shell or requiring a shared filesystem -- additions to the history are sent over UDP to a persistent server process.
Replacement history command with enhanced search features, like temporal predicates (history --since '1 day ago') and searches for commands you performed within a specific directory (history --at .).
Ctrl-r keybinding, which looks visually identical to one included with bash, but changes the behavior slightly to be more useful.
- Ctrl-r searches the full multi-host multi-terminal database, but prefers hits from commands you performed within the current working directory.
- The search state isn't persistent in the same way as it is with the builtin, so Ctrl-r always start searching from the same place, and after exiting out of Ctrl-r, the behavior of the up and down arrow bindings are not modified.

Usage

If you're operating inside a company cluster or university computer system and you want to consolidate history so that it's shared no matter which box you're logged into, you'll first need to pick which machine you want to act as the "server". Your login node / workstation would be a good choice.

Then just add

eval "$(/path/to/binary/history --eval myworkstation.mycompany.com)"

to your .bashrc file.

If you don't care to pool your history across multiple boxes, then you can add

Then just add

eval "$(/path/to/binary/history --eval 127.0.0.1)"

to your .bashrc file instead.

Inspiration / alternatives

zsh-history: I copied the database schema and a lot of the CLI options from zsh-history, which is very nice. I don't use zsh, so that was the first difference. (The other difference is that zsh-history doesn't pool history from multiple machines without a shared filesystem, I think.)
atuin: wow, this looks very fancy, nice job. I'm personally looking for something a bit more minimal with the ctrl-r keybindings, but this looks great.
mcfly: Some cool ideas here, but I was personally not sold on the use of machine learning for this application.
bash-history-sqlite: Nice and simple. I like this.

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An enhanced history(1) for bash

Related tags

Overview

history

Usage

Inspiration / alternatives

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Releases(v2022.06.19)

v2022.06.19(Jun 20, 2022)

v2022.04.17(Apr 17, 2022)

Owner

Robert T. McGibbon

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