I have nearly a decade of zsh history. Reading that article I came to the conclusion that I may have been hit by that bug in the past but I haven’t noticed.
Then I kept reading and the author mentions accidentally exporting HISTFILE[1] and I screamed in terror and ran to my computer as I realized a mistake I’ve been making for…ever.
I am now both happy and sad I read this article.
[1] https://github.com/stapelberg/configfiles/commit/32dcda0f49a...
I'm always curious what people get out of their terminal history. About 98% of mine is embarrassing and made for the ether.
Have you ever looked back on your history?
Some things are worth an alias, or a script, some things aren't quite worth either but you still wanna run them again in the future. I think that's where history helps. Awkward niche one-liners. Also sometimes you do something for the first time, take a bit to figure it out, then 6-12 months later it's easier to check your shell history than relearn the process from scratch again. Also sometimes you may want to run something new that's very similar to an old thing you ran, like maybe you forget which rsync args you've been using lately and you wanna use the same ones but on different files. Search up your last rsync, edit paths.
I used to start my history over with each PC, but last year when I upgraded my primary machine I decided to copy over my browser history and shell history in addition to the usual dotfiles and stuff. It's honestly been really nice and convenient. It almost feels like cheating that I can see stuff older than the machine that I did.
I do to find a command that I know I ran that did something but I don't remember exactly how I did it. It's rare, but it's useful to be able to.
With Atuin, I hit ctrl-r and go to directory mode, and get the commands I ran the last time I was in that directory.
Same here, atuin is such a time-saver, especially when it comes "oh dang, I ran this command on another host but I need it here now". It just works as you'd expect!
To recover the past working context, not necessarily looking up a specific command (but that, too, – on certain occasions).
I also hold over a decade worth of zsh history and revisit it from time to time to reconstruct the full memory of what I was working on N years ago.
> About 98% of mine is embarrassing and made for the ether.
Same
> Have you ever looked back on your history?
All the time? I search in my history, re-launch past commands, etc.
Now it's typically recent history, usually same day.
I know about the shortcuts etc. but I also need to at times pipe history into other commands so I've got a two letters alias:
Which greps into my history. I use that h? all the time.