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Comment by matthewaveryusa | Hacker News Reader

A very valid use-case not mentioned in the article is to save all your personal terminal interactions to a database so you can search it in the future. Your terminal's input (and output) value per byte is enormous so really everyone should be saving it all.

I'll be horsing around with this tonight -- I hope ts sshing to my local computer will just work so I can get local recording as well without a separate mechanism.

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The value is enormous but the security sensitivity is too, so it's important to only store it in secure places.

And on a company laptop with automagic backups to the cloud of your home directory, what's secure? At a previous company I disabled persistent shell history, and lost count of the number of times this prevented a sensitive password or key from being added to the treasure trove of secrets that are backup archives. (The backup app nominally supported exclusions, but 1) I don't trust the correctness of corporate bloatware, and more importantly 2) I don't trust that IT or an update wouldn't reset those exclusions.)

Now, shell sessions from a bastion host scream (hopefully!) security sensitive to IT. Moreover, at that point you shouldn't be entering any passwords or keys; one should trust least the integrity of application servers and similar end nodes. But dumps from company laptop home directories where 99% is crap from sales and management... no way that is going to be treated with proper care, no matter how much customer PII it might contain.

The real problem here is you are typing those "sensitive password or key" into termianl. Instead of type it directly, Use `read password` and `mysql -p$password` is the right way. Additionally, most programs can use environment variables directly, so you can even avoid showing them in the command line arguments.

If you entered something in terminal directly, I won't call it sensitive.

In this day an age, are workstation backups really necessary? I can't think of anything important I do on my work machine that would need it. Maybe a days worth of code edits that haven't been pushed to GitHub.

For me personally yes absolutely.

But I'm not much into the whole cloud movement for privacy reasons.

If its windows and you use weird certs for external interaction like most power pools do, its pretty important, especially thw solutions that spin up a vm in the cloud foe you quickly.

On a company laptop this all sounds like the company's problem, not mine.

This project was mentioned recently here - it does this locally, saving to sqlite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35839470

https://github.com/ellie/atuin

And it looked amazing, until another user pointed out that if you install it, whitespace-prefixed commands will start being saved in your bash history, and they refuse to document this behaviour

Does mcfly also have this behavior? https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

Answering my own question, McFly does not have record whitespace prefixed commands.

Ooh, didn't see that.

I've thought about this too - if you use tmux, you can use `tmux capture-pane` to grab all the output and scrollback in the current window.

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