Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. With this context, Atuin gives you faster and better search of your shell history!
Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted (E2EE) synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server, or you can self-host your own server. There is a single command to easily delete your data from the server too.
It supports zsh, bash, fish, and nushell shells right now.
The search is as easy as pressing the up arrow in the terminal and then scrolling back, or typing to search. But you could also type something like this to do a search [search for all successful make commands, recorded after 3pm yesterday
atuin search --exit 0 --after “yesterday 3pm” make].
Atuin offers configurable full text or fuzzy search, filterable by host, directory, etc. As it has context around dates, times, exit code, and even the directory location form where a command was executed, you could use the -c flag to just search for commands run in a particular directory.
The sync function allows you to have the same history across terminals, across sessions, and across machines.
There is a quick start script that can be run to install it, otherwise you can also install from the various Linux repos. For manual installation, the steps I found to get going were:
- Install Ble.sh and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file
- Install Atuin and add it to your .bashrc (or other shell) file (after Ble.sh)
- Restart your shell and run ‘atuin import bash’ to import my bash history into Atuin
- Press up arrow to see if Atuin interactive search triggers
The link below has some good documentation as well a link to their source code.
#technology #Linux #opensource
What I found compelling about the sync is that you can have your other machines’ histories there with you, but in the background, behind a different shortcut, just in case you need to re-run or check that command you ran somewhere else few years ago…
As I said, I haven’t used that yet, but that’s in many ways more appealing than having to SSH onto said machine (assuming it’s even possible).
Ah, ok, that makes more sense. That also solves any ordering problem if you, say, you’re running local and elsewhere commands and a sync means pressing up gives you an unexpected item.