I'm familiar with ctrl-r, but I still very much like the up-arrow behavior described by that commenter.

Looking at it from a "law of least surprise" angle, it's exactly how it should behave.

"I typed 'cd di↑' and you're giving me 'pwd'??"

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).

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.

There is a difference, I believe. Doesn't Ctrl+r do a substring search instead?

Yes it's different: it will match anywhere in the previous command lines.

And once you want to one-up this look into fzf.

And once you get tired of fzf and want something better, you reach for https://atuin.sh.

Completely transformed all of my workflows

From the atuin.sh website

> Sync your shell history to all of your machines

I think of my shell history as very machine specific. Can you give some insights on how you benefit from history sync? If you use it.

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.

Same, I find shared history not very useful.

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.

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.

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*.

[1]: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-...

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.

I sync Atuin to my home server but I also configure it to be host specific by default.

Prefix search is faster for the majority of cases. CTRL-r / FZF is useful for the remaining ones.

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

Atuin[1] feels like the best of both worlds to me.

[1] https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

Atuin looks pretty nice — I might give it a try.

I went down the “fully automatic history” path before, but it mostly turned into noise for me.

Keeping a tiny cheatsheet of things I had to look up twice ended up working better.

Ctrl-r can’t replace prefix search.