> How do you handle maintaining this as you transition through jobs, machines, etc?
Currently, the tool reads ~/.mergerc, which is a JSON file with a list of SSH hosts to SCP history to and from. As long as the history file is in the same place (it tends to be on hosts that I setup, and otherwise I check in default locations) and the host has an entry in ~/.ssh/config, the tool will work. It's really just a wrapper for a few SCP invocations plus a history file (extended) format parser.
Changing servers is just a change in the config file, but it's also helpful for changing jobs, because I can quickly add a bit of filtering before the merging happens. I had to erase some API keys and such a few times, adding `filter` call here: https://github.com/piotrklibert/zsh-merge-hist/blob/master/s... took care of it.
> what is your workflow around maintaining these one off ad hoc "developer boost" type tools?
Good question. I don't have such workflow, at all. When I commit to write something like this, I try to make sure that it has a scope limited enough so that it can be "completed" or "done". In this case, the tool builds on SSH/SCP and a file format that hasn't changed in the last 20 years (at least). So, once I had it working, there was nothing much to do with it after that. The only change I had to do recently was changing `+` to `*` in the parser, because somehow (not sure how, actually) an empty command made it into the file. But that's all I had to do in 5 years time.
I'm not as extreme, but suckless.org philosophy appears to work well here. Here's another example: https://github.com/piotrklibert/nimlock - it's a port, done because I wanted to do something in Nim, but it worked for me for years and I suspect it still works now (after going full remote I stopped needing it). There's nothing much that could break (well, Wayland would break it, but I don't use it), and so there's not much you need to do in terms of maintenance.
As for language choices - these are basically random. I made the zsh-merge-hist in Scala simply because I was interested in Scala back then. I have little tools written in Nim, OCaml, Racket, Elisp, Raku - and even AWK (pretty nice language actually) and shell. That's another reason why making the tools any more complex than what's absolutely necessary would be a problem: the churn in the ecosystems tends to be too high for me to keep track of, especially since I'd need to track 10 of them.
EDIT: I forgot, but obviously the most important "trick" is not giving a shit if these things work for anyone else but me :D
> I'm checking it out
If you have Java installed, `./gradlew installDist` should give you `./build/install/bin/zsh-merge-hist` executable to run. The ~/.mergerc (on the host the tool runs) should look like this:
{
"hosts": ["host1"],
"tempDir": "/tmp/zsh-merge-hist",
"sourcePath": "mgmnt/zsh_history"
}
where `sourcePath` is a path to history file relative to the home directory.