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Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

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Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#31

Post by euoia »

arno_v wrote: post #28
saagarjha wrote: post #20

This is zsh specific, but here's something I've been burned by enough times that I specifically wanted to mention it: save your history in a file other than the default one. Why? Because if you increase the history limit, and your profile isn't sourced for any reason, the shell will read your history file and use the default history size, clobbering everything that's there. If you use a non-default history file this…

I will try this, recently mine got truncated (don't know why) and it's super annoying.

If you have time machine, you may be able to recover the old history file.

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#33

Post by pletnes »

skissane wrote: post #27
matthberg wrote: post #2

I often have multiple concurrent sessions of terminal open, which leads to messed up history interactions. One solution I've encountered (but have not tested yet) is zsh-histdb [0]. It stores sessions' history to a SQLite db instead of a single appended file, with extra metadata about when commands were run, what session, etc. If you've already got your .zshrc file open to mess with the history settings it might be w…

Storing history in SQLite is such a wonderful idea, I wonder why someone doesn’t just add it to readline/libedit/etc, then all apps (which use those libraries) can do it. Although, I wonder if that might cause problems, if apps already link to SQLite and they might expect a different version, or if unstable apps might cause concurrency/corruption/etc issues with a shared per-user history DB. To avoid all that, maybe…

The xonsh shell can use sqlite for history. Really useful, also contains runtime statistics, for instance. I used xonsh for a few weeks. It is absolutely an awesome shell, but I didn’t find the switch worth the effort personally.

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#34

Post by nicoburns »

a1445c8b wrote: post #25
jmmv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own, but know that you are stuck with a really old version of bash if you do that, and it has some “interesting” bugs in it. See something I wrote a little while ago on this topic: https://jmmv.dev/2019/11/macos-bash-baggage.html

Not necessarily if one installs bash from homebrew.

That's true, but the `chsh -s /bin/bash` that someone posted upthread does not use the homebrew version.

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#35

Post by vdchuyen »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #3

OT but the first command I type on a new install of MacOS is $ chsh -s /bin/bash because I have 20 years worth of bash scripts that I've carefully tailored to work on bash in MacOS and Linux and I don't have time to rewrite them all just because Apple decided they don't like GPLv3.

No post body was provided.

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#36

Post by misnome »

saagarjha wrote: post #20

This is zsh specific, but here's something I've been burned by enough times that I specifically wanted to mention it: save your history in a file other than the default one. Why? Because if you increase the history limit, and your profile isn't sourced for any reason, the shell will read your history file and use the default history size, clobbering everything that's there. If you use a non-default history file this…

I got burned a couple of times in the past with bash-history, and go a small step beyond this, even on zsh, and added to .zshrc:

    preexec_custom_history() {
      echo "$HOSTNAME $$ $(date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z") $1" >> "~/.fullhistory"
    }
    preexec_functions+=(preexec_custom_history)
I work on a lot of shared-filesystem computers, and so it's useful to be able to filter for commands ~year ago when I know what computer I was on when I ran it. I have a fzf binding to search through this with ctrl-r, and it's otherwise easily greppable.

When I was still using bash, I had this same thing using https://github.com/rcaloras/bash-preexec .

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#37

Post by saagarjha »

euoia wrote: post #31
arno_v wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try this, recently mine got truncated (don't know why) and it's super annoying.

If you have time machine, you may be able to recover the old history file.

I lost two history files to the ether, and repaired several more with Time Machine before I got fed up with dealing with this anymore. (I still have Time Machine enabled, but I haven't had to restore my bash history from it in years.)

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#38

Post by dewey »

outcoldman wrote: post #7
matthberg wrote: post #2

I often have multiple concurrent sessions of terminal open, which leads to messed up history interactions. One solution I've encountered (but have not tested yet) is zsh-histdb [0]. It stores sessions' history to a SQLite db instead of a single appended file, with extra metadata about when commands were run, what session, etc. If you've already got your .zshrc file open to mess with the history settings it might be w…

If somebody is interested in macos app for storing your history (bash,zsh,fish) and syncing it with icloud, I have built an app ShellHistory, v2 is available via TestFlight if you want to try it. https://loshadki.app/blog/2022-09-22-public-beta-shellhistor... (monterey and ventura) And this is a link to v1 https://loshadki.app/shellhistory/ (big sur+)

This looks great, one of these things I always wanted to build myself so I'm glad someone did a better job and shipped it!

Thanks for sharing!

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#39

Post by pastage »

outcoldman wrote: post #7
matthberg wrote: post #2

I often have multiple concurrent sessions of terminal open, which leads to messed up history interactions. One solution I've encountered (but have not tested yet) is zsh-histdb [0]. It stores sessions' history to a SQLite db instead of a single appended file, with extra metadata about when commands were run, what session, etc. If you've already got your .zshrc file open to mess with the history settings it might be w…

If somebody is interested in macos app for storing your history (bash,zsh,fish) and syncing it with icloud, I have built an app ShellHistory, v2 is available via TestFlight if you want to try it. https://loshadki.app/blog/2022-09-22-public-beta-shellhistor... (monterey and ventura) And this is a link to v1 https://loshadki.app/shellhistory/ (big sur+)

Warning while this looks sweet, but this a security breach in the making. Having mistakes done in CLI local to the machine and session has saved me many times from storing really stupid stuff in the command history.

I am not sure what safe guards are needed before I can use this. Which makes it hard to recommend it. Especially since security is not mentioned at all on that page.

Re: Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings

#40

Post by sdrothrock »

> If you have a shell open and echo "test", then history | grep echo, it will return something like: 891 echo "test".

>

> However, if you issue 16 more unique commands, history | grep echo will no longer be able to find your 891 echo "test" entry.

On zsh, history only returns the last 16 commands, which is the default. But if you type `history 0`, it will return all commands since the zeroth index.

So if I want to search my entire history for instances of a command like this example, I don't modify anything, but just type `history 0 | grep echo` and that does what the author seems to be expecting.

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