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  • I'm only interested in how it treats multiline commands in bash. It's the only thing that the default history doesn't do consistently (unless you make it replace \n with ;, which is just unuable). Otherwise, fzf + history works just fine.
    by krick
  • Just enable perpetual bash history and install fzf. That will get you CTRL-R (and a lot of other niceties) out of the box.
    by themadsens
  • Perfect! I wanted this without all the extras of atuin that I never use.
    by chaz6
  • How do these compare to the fish builtin history search with dir awareness and completion menu? I found it quite an improvement to bash history handling but fish isn't POSIX compatible so sometimes you need to switch back and forth.
    by mkesper
  • As a user of atuin, it also keep track of the status code of a previous command, as well as its execution time.

    It’s quite handy.

    by jiehong
  • is there a particular reason why i'd want sqlite-backed shell history? i mean sure it works but why not a text file? (which i'd assume is somewhat faster because you can just append)

    i guess you could say it's because you may want dates for each command but for that you can just use a CSV or TSV file no?

    does it have to do with the searching?

    by apodik
  • SQLite gives indexes that makes searching and locating previous entries much faster. This is relevant when the history is over 100K entries and one wants to avoid duplicates in history files.
    by fpoling
  • I have a regular Bash shell history with about 750 000 entries on an SSD on a modern laptop, and would take about 1 second for Bash to load 1 million entries. The startup delay and the memory usage is noticeable.

    Storing the shell command history in a database instead of the memory of each interactive Bash shell, it would make Bash start up faster, and also use less memory.

    by ptspts
  • In my case, I use Atuin. It has a concept of "context" so you can easily search the history for commands related to your current directory / project / etc. See [0] for some examples.

    Now, I admit I don't use these that often, but they can be useful.

    It also does stats and whatnot based on the history. I've never looked at those.

    [0] https://docs.atuin.sh/latest/guide/advanced-usage/

    by vladvasiliu
  • I recently “fixed” my bash history since the default experience when using multiple terminals sucks.

    https://dandavis.dev/the-bash-history-i-always-wanted.html

    I also use fzf to search my history I believe you just need so source the right keybindings file to make ctrl+r use fzf.

    by danofsteel32
  • Have you tried http://atuin.sh
    by fragmede
  • For me personally, while I like the history element, if I'm gathering/storing/searching everything, I'd love to also see the command output with the entered command, giving much better context.

    Currently I tend to log all my ssh sessions out to text files and grep through the whole lot to find what I want, so a better version of that would be lovely, especially if it could automatically redact secrets or similar, as I'm aware thats a downside of the current setup.

    by gertrunde
  • A little curious but too lazy to find out, what's the difference between this and atuin vs fzf?

    Also I do like the premise, recently stopped using atuin due to all the extra bells and whistles and just went back to fzf.

    by podocarp
  • seems to only have session agnostic history and a TUI for searching it, because the author didn't want all the features atuin offers. only 400 LOC too, pretty neat
    by apodik
  • For those of you on zsh, I have been a big fan of https://github.com/larkery/zsh-histdb

    It is written entirely in shell script, with the only dependency being sqlite itself.

    by craftkiller
  • <unrelated side note for the author>

    I would never normally mention this, but I'm reading this repo on mobile & it seems Forgejo doesn't wrap .txt files on mobile. Any reason not to use .md for a new project in 2026?

    by lucideer
  • I looked it up, because for me it looked kind of cool. It's tangled not Forgejo when i got it right.

    [1] https://tangled.org/

    by exiguus
  • As indicated in https://tangled.org/oppi.li/stinkpot/blob/cdf87ffcd36e96f3d4... , this software (stinkpot) still uses Bash PROMPT_COMMAND as an entry point to copy new shell history entries to its database.

    PROMPT_COMMAND has the following flaw: a command gets recorded as soon as it has finished. So command which never finish (e.g. because they run for a long time, and the user closes the terminal window, or reboots the system) never get recorded. Another flaw: the users starts a long-running command in terminal window 1, and immediately they want to start a variant of it in terminal window 2, but it's not available in the history.

    by ptspts
  • What would be a better entry point? I honestly thought there would some hook for saving history specifically
    by superb_dev
  • FWIW I use atuin (https://atuin.sh/) and am reasonably happy with it, especially the infinite capacity & snapiness. Ignoring the sync features, I believe it's also sqlite backed when running in local-only mode.
    by NightMKoder
  • So can it run without AI? They promote their own AI on the website and that is really the last thing I want in my Shell
    by INTPenis
  • AFAIK it is always backed by a sqlite DB. That way the sync just populates the DB and the completion process doesn't care (or wait for) the central source.
    by tstenner
  • The readme starts by saying how the author used to use atuin, and why they wrote stinkpot as a less featureful alternative.
    by Valodim