Atuin – Magical Shell History

If I explicitly DON’T want sync between machines (my workflows are very machine specific), does atuin give me anything significant over my current fzf based C-r?

Ability to change the search mode (prefix, full text, fuzzy), and filter by path/host, time range, exit code, current session only, and more

Atuin stores much more context than ctrl-r does - exit codes, command duration and directory, etc

Also has functions for filtering command search by directory

Being backed by SQLite tends to mean your history is more durable + is properly saved across shells too

> does atuin give me anything significant over my current fzf based C-r

I'm interested in this as well. I currently use fzf and I'm happy with what I've got (except for me syncing would probably be a nice feature to have).

Also: I gave atuin a quick try and found the TUI to be worse than fzf. Why do I need a fullscreen ctrl-r interface? I found that distracting. But maybe that is configurable. I didn't look much further.

It is configurable!

And also the default is now to use 40 lines, not the alt screen (has its own drawbacks)

You can set “inline_height”

https://docs.atuin.sh/guide/basic-usage/#inline-window

Thank you. In might try it again some day.

I have been a reluctant adopter of Atuin.

I don't use the sync feature, but I will say that "my workflows are very machine specific" is one of the reasons I use Atuin. When working in containers, I sometimes share an Atuin database volume between them, to save history relevant to those containers.

On MacOS the main reason I reach for Atuin is that I have never been able to get ZSH to store history properly. Atuin saves history to SQLite, which so far has been much more reliable. It also enables some nice features like being able to search commands run from the same directory.

But the inline_height seems to be a constant, rather than a percentage of the window, which is weird.

As long as you're here, do you know if the column showing the amount of time the command took can be removed? I know you can remove it from "atuin history list" with history_format, but I don't see a way to remove it from the inline window.