Better Shell History Search

I use bog-standard zsh without any plugins or any of the fancy stuff, but one of the most useful tricks I use is to leverage interactive comments. If I have a long command I know I run will frequently, I 'tag' them at the end by a shell comment[1].

So for example, I have one that I use to run software updates:

    softwareupdate --include-config-data --install --all --restart # system:update:restart

I have a similar one without the `--restart` option that I tag with `:norestart` instead, but you get the idea—I put related commands under a common term.

Then I can just use the ctrl-r builtin keybinding, type `:system` and cycle through system related commands, or go exactly to the command I want. The beauty of this is that it also works in bash and systems I remote into (which I frequently need to do at work), without any extra plugins required.

[1]: interactive comments are disabled by default in zsh, but can be enabled with `setopt interactive_comments`

I use Atuin and like it a lot, and sync history across hosts.

However, the fuzzy search in Atuin is worse than fzf, which was a downgrade. It just has less effective heuristics/scoring, e.g. it might find the individual letters of a short command scattered in a command that had a long base64 input or something.

I have my own solution that I've been using for many years — I record all my bash history.

Bash has a hook (cannot remember the name on my phone) that is called on every command.

It's easy enough to write into a file the command together with the directory and git branch.

Then I can grep it with a bash function that colors the dir and branch in the output.

It does not replace ctrl-r but it's a great addition especially when running multiple sessions and bash saving just the last one

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476793

Decades have passed and HN still can’t automatically dedup submissions.

Have been using Atuin for a couple (few?) years, it's great! How many others are using it too? I'm curious what everyone's tool of choice for shell search is!

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

I’ve always just done

  alias hst=“history | fzf”

Not nearly as feature full but the simplicity of it makes me happy :)

An unfortunate problem with using awk: there are three different versions of awk, and it is frighteningly easy to use a feature that exists on one but not other.

(source: I have written unit tests against different versions of awk. That was... unpleasant.)

shameless plug: http://sysop.user.uucp.hu/bash-extended-history/content.md

Aka using fzf/skim with a script for relative timestamps; and some reasons to avoid atuin or fish.

Good to know about skim as an fzf alternative.