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Comment by ChickeNES | Hacker News Reader

I found atuin way too hard/slow to use, I think I went two days before I nuked it and went back to pure omzsh. Has it gotten any better in the past 2ish years?

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(hi! I work on atuin!)

yes, it's improved a lot in the last couple of years! what in particular bothered you?

Not the parent commenter, but I also tried it a year or two ago and my recollection is that I had a similar experience. I have a really long history file that dates back like a decade and if remembering correctly I tried to import it, and it made using my shell very laggy so I ended up removing it. I'm not 100% positive that I'm remembering the exact way that I started experiencing the lag though, so if I have time tomorrow I'll try it out again and see if it's still something I encounter.

Ahh yes, we’ve done a lot of performance optimisation since then. We regularly test on >1m records and have no issues

Make sure you’re using the daemon (the install script will handle this) and you should be good to go

Very happy to help if you have any problems. Ellie at Atuin dot sh

Good to hear! Sounds like my history file might not even be that large compared to your tests now

I'm curious, is using the daemon with my own frontend a supported use case? Because I had a thought...while as I mentioned above I don't use the CLI much anymore...my agents do, and having that history in a sql db would be mighty useful...

Edit: Okay, y'all are literally working on exactly what I need to build off of, perfect lmao

we actually have an mcp built on top of this that you can use, no problem!

I think it was a combo of this + completely screwing my muscle memory haha. I'd give it another shot...but tbh, these days claude/codex are more my command line than bash/zsh.

I'm running into this again now that I'm trying it. I also have the unfortunate habit of sometimes trying to do stuff in the terminal via remote connection over a streaming server from my SteamOS handheld, and in the desktop input layout I have defined, I can really easily hit the up arrow with my thumbstick, whereas any modifier shortcuts need to be defined manually. From glancing through the config file, there does seem to be a lot of customization though, so I think it might still be viable if I can find a sweet spot in how to define the settings.

I've been using it happily for longer than that! I do remember having to tweak the default search behaviours when I first installed it but it's been largely problem free ever since.

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