leomichalski / smart-bash-history

Interactive, synchronized and resilient shell history for modern developer

Smart history

Default shell history behaviour was designed in the 90s. A lot has changed since then - time to catch up!

Features:

• fast, interactive search interface using fzf
• synchronization across multiple terminals (entries from current session stay on top!)
• unlimited history (plus a command to remove duplicates)
• automatic backup and protection against terminal crashes

All of this using less than 100 lines of shell script, without changing history file format.

Installation

1. Clone the repo and make sure bash will load 01-main-settings.sh on startup (Note: Mac users should update ~/.bash_profile instead of ~/.bashrc):

   git clone https://github.com/jan-warchol/smart-bash-history.git
   echo 'source $HOME/smart-bash-history/01-main-settings.sh' >> ~/.bashrc
   

2. Download fzf into smart-bash-history. Assuming 64-bit Linux:

   cd smart-bash-history
   wget https://github.com/junegunn/fzf-bin/releases/download/0.18.0/fzf-0.18.0-linux_amd64.tgz -O- | tar xz
   

3. New shell sessions should have smart history enabled.

Usage

Press Ctrl-R and start typing to interactively search history (you can use arrows). Confirm selection by pressing return. history command itself works the same as before.

To filter your history file, removing trivial commands and keeping only one occurrence of each entry, run filter_bash_history.

Gotchas

• History entry numbers change on each reload (by default on each prompt)
• multiline commands aren't well tested