I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

Have you even used the up arrow key to go back to your last command? This is like that, but does a lot more.

I think she is tackling a problem here that can't be solved by another tool, no matter how good it is. Thus, ever getting enough people to pay for it will be tough.

The issue isn't "I can't remember how to run a command I just ran." The issue is that the universe of CLI tooling you use is too large, too inconsistent, and too complex to remember how to use them all. Conventions may be wildly different between Windows and Unix, BSD and GNU, many tools have existed for over 50 years now and have accumulated enormous feature creep. Many newer tools try to improve upon perceived complexity of past tools, but by being different, they introduce even more complexity into the overall set of tools for anyone who can't abandon the past tools. There are huge debates about environment variables, config file formats, whether parameters should use one dash or two, what even is a parameter versus an argument versus a flag, how a tool should use STDOUT versus STDERR, how it should use exit codes, whether output should be structured or free text, and nobody agrees on the answers. There is very little standardization, and where standards exist, you can't count on anything to actually follow these.

Contrasts these with the tools of a painter or wordworker. They're similar enough that learning to paint in high school art class will transfer muscle memory near perfectly to every brush and surface you ever use for the rest of your life. Creating a tool like this is throwing up your hands and saying no human can ever hope to remember how to use their tools, so they need an additional tool that remembers for them. But now we also need to remember how to query this memory augmenter, so you've introduced yet another thing to learn for anyone who isn't willing to just stop trying to learn other tools at all and rely 100% on yours.

It isn't to say it can't be useful, but you're trying to solve an ecosystem problem with a tool. You can't. At best, you can alleviate a tiny portion of the difficulty for a very small number of users sufficiently similar to you. Then you run into the culture of not having to pay for these things mentioned elsewhere. On systems like Windows and Mac, they may be paid systems, but once you pay, you automatically the full suite of system utilities and CLI tooling. BSD and GNU were free creations made largely by university professors and industy professionals in their spare time for the purpose of sharing, not for making money. Fair or not, the expectation became and will likely remain that these tools either come as part of a larger package, or they're donated from the spare time of their own users.

Exceptions are few and far between. You've got things like curl and openssl that sustain themselves reasonably well as open source CLI packages, but even those don't charge for the tool itself. They only succeed because they're so ubiquitous that if a barely perceptible proportion of users ever donate or pay for support, that is still enough. That model doesn't work if your userbase isn't virtually the entire world of computing.

It’s already supported; you can ctrl + R from the atuin interface to filter for commands run in your current directory.

Maybe it's crazy, but I'm one of those people who tries to make a living of the goodwill of people and companies. I am working for free since several months on Biome (https://biomejs.dev), a fast formatter and linter for JS/TS/JSX. At the moment we do not have enough donations to be paid for our contributions.

Best of luck. I hope there's a path forward where open source can provide a reasonable income stream.

I maintain a couple of open source package for emacs -- it's a labour of love. I'm happy to help folks with their issues, but it's easy to say "sorry, I don't have capacity to add this feature" or "no, I don't think this is a good fit for the project". If I depended on this for money.. well this would change the whole approach, wouldn't it?