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Better Shell History Search

I spend an awful lot of my day in Unix terminals running shell commands. For some reason, the variance in efficiency between different people when using the shell is huge: I know people who can run rings around me, and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the previous command.

Since many command-line tools have hard-to-remember options, we can save huge chunks of time – not to mention make fewer errors – if we can search our shell history to find a previous incantation of a command we want to run. Few things in life make me as happy as pressing ctrl-R then typing “ l1 ” and having a 100 character command-line execution that runs a complicated debugging tool, with multiple environment variables set, whose output gets put in/tmp/l1 appear in my terminal. I quickly came across Atuin, which is a much more sophisticated shell history recording mechanism: the video on its front page showed a much nicer matching UI than I had previously considered possible.

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