What I love about the default Bash Crtl-C behaviour is that once a command has been located, the bash history is moved to the history of that command, until Enter is pressed.
$ a
bash: a: command not found
$ b
bash: b: command not found
$ c
bash: c: command not found
$ d
bash: d: command not found
$ <CTRL-R> b <UP>
$ a
That's great if I don't remember which command I was experimenting with, but I do know other commands that I did around that time (usually a file that I edited with VIM).
That feature is entirely optional and disabled by default. Atuin stores your shell history locally in a sqlite db regardless of whether you choose to sync it. I thought fzf was fast, but atuin makes it look slow by comparison.
However what I do find useful is eternal history. It's doable with some .bashrc hacks, and slow because it's file based on every command, but:
- never delete history
- associate history with a session token
- set separate tokens in each screen, tmux, whatever session
- sort such that backward search (ctrl-R) hits current session history first, and the rest second
Like half my corporate brain is in a 11M history file at this point, going back years.
What I would love is to integrate this into the shell better so it's using sqlite or similar so it doesn't feel "sluggish." But even now the pain is worth the prize.
I just want to give a perspective of someone that uses the 'eternal history' in bash per Eli Bandersky [1] and reluctance to use something like atuin (without/ignoring shared history).
First, as for speed and responsiveness, if there is a degradation, it is imperceptible to me. I wouldn't have a clue that my interactive shell is slowing down because it is logging a command to ~/.persistent_history.
My persistent_history is 4MB and has been migrated from machine to machine as I've upgraded, it's never felt slow to edit with (neo)vim or search with system supplied grep.
Eli's way of doing it also includes the timestamps for all commands, so it's easy to trace back when I had run the command, and duplicates are suppressed. In fact my longest persistent_history goes back to 2019-07-04, so I've been using it for quite some time now.
But the larger point I wanted to make is that I wouldn't feel comfortable switching this, in my opinion, quite efficient setup to displace it with an sqlite database. That would require a special tool to drill through the history and search rendering simple unix utilities useless. As Eli suggested, if your history gets too big, simply rotate the file and carry on. I have the alias phgrep to grep ~/.persistent_history, but I can easily have another alias to grep ~/.persistent_history*.
You don't have to setup shared history with Atuin if you don't want to and that's what's holding you back. Otherwise it hits the rest of your requirements. Just don't hesitate to change from the default config.
1. work on a project on host_foo in /home/user/src/myproject
2. clone it on host_bar in /home/user/src/myproject
If you set filter_mode = "directory", you can recall project specific commands from host_foo for use on host_bar even though you're working on different machines and the search space won't be cluttered with project specific commands for other projects.
If you use multiple terminals it kinda sucks unless you do export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' in your.bashrc or something cause only the last closed terminal saves to history
export EDITOR=vi and then hitting Esc puts you into vi mode; k, j to move up/down through history or pressing / to search etc including using regex is all available.
