Hishtory
Your shell history: synced, queryable, and in context
Install / Use
/learn @ddworken/HishtoryREADME
hiSHtory: Better Shell History
hishtory is a better shell history. It stores your shell history in context (what directory you ran the command in, whether it succeeded or failed, how long it took, etc). This is all stored locally and end-to-end encrypted for syncing to to all your other computers. All of this is easily queryable via the hishtory CLI. This means from your laptop, you can easily find that complex bash pipeline you wrote on your server, and see the context in which you ran it.
Getting Started
To install hishtory on your first machine:
curl https://hishtory.dev/install.py | python3 -
At this point, hishtory is already managing your shell history (for bash, zsh, and fish!). Give it a try by pressing Control+R and see below for more details on the advanced search features.
Then to install hishtory on your other computers, you need your secret key. Get this by running hishtory status. Once you have it, you follow similar steps to install hiSHtory on your other computers:
curl https://hishtory.dev/install.py | python3 -
hishtory init $YOUR_HISHTORY_SECRET
Now if you press Control+R on first computer, you can automatically see the commands you've run on all your other computers!
Features
Querying
You can then query hiSHtory by pressing Control+R in your terminal. Search for a command, select it via Enter, and then have it ready to execute in your terminal's buffer. Or just hit Escape if you don't want to execute it after all.
Both support the same query format, see the below annotated queries:
| Query | Explanation |
|---|---|
| psql | Find all commands containing psql |
| psql db.example.com | Find all commands containing psql and db.example.com |
| "docker run" hostname:my-server | Find all commands containing docker run that were run on the computer with hostname my-server |
| nano user:root | Find all commands containing nano that were run as root |
| exit_code:127 | Find all commands that exited with code 127 |
| service before:2022-02-01 | Find all commands containing service run before February 1st 2022 |
| service after:2022-02-01 | Find all commands containing service run after February 1st 2022 |
For true power users, you can even query directly in SQLite via sqlite3 -cmd 'PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL' ~/.hishtory/.hishtory.db.
Enable/Disable
If you want to temporarily turn on/off hiSHtory recording, you can do so via hishtory disable (to turn off recording) and hishtory enable (to turn on recording). You can check whether or not hishtory is enabled via hishtory status.
Deletion
hishtory redact can be used to delete history entries that you didn't intend to record. It accepts the same search format as hishtory query. For example, to delete all history entries containing psql, run hishtory redact psql.
Alternatively, you can delete items from within the terminal UI. Press Control+R to bring up the TUI, search for the item you want to delete, and then press Control+K to delete the currently selected entry.
Updating
To update hishtory to the latest version, just run hishtory update to securely download and apply the latest update.
Advanced Features
<details> <summary>AI Shell Assistance</summary><blockquote>If you are ever trying to figure out a shell command and searching your history isn't working, you can query ChatGPT by prefixing your query with ?. For example, press Control+R and then type in ? list all files larger than 1MB:
If you would like to:
- Disable this, you can run
hishtory config-set ai-completion false - Run this with your own OpenAI API key (thereby ensuring that your queries do not pass through the centrally hosted hiSHtory server), you can run
export OPENAI_API_KEY='...'
The TUI (opened via Control+R) supports a number of key bindings:
| Key | Result | |--------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------| | Left/Right | Scroll the search query left/right | | Up/Down | Scroll the table up/down | | Page Up/Down | Scroll the table up/down by one page | | Shift + Left/Right | Scroll the table left/right | | Control+K | Delete the selected command |
Press Control+H to view a help page documenting these.
You can also customize hishtory's key bindings for the TUI. Run hishtory config-get key-bindings to see the current key bindings. You can then run hishtory config-set key-bindings $action $keybinding to configure custom key bindings.
You can customize the columns that are displayed via hishtory config-set displayed-columns. For example, to display only the cwd and command:
hishtory config-set displayed-columns CWD Command
The list of supported columns are: Hostname, CWD, Timestamp, Runtime, ExitCode, Command, and User (along with any custom columns).
Many of the column names also support custom shorter column names to save space. For example, rather than having a column named Exit Code, it can be referenced as $? to save space. See here for the full list of column names that can be used.
You can create custom column definitions that are populated from arbitrary commands. For example, if you want to create a new column named git_remote that contains the git remote if the cwd is in a git directory, you can run:
hishtory config-add custom-columns git_remote '(git remote -v 2>/dev/null | grep origin 1>/dev/null ) && git remote get-url origin || true'
hishtory config-add displayed-columns git_remote
You can customize hishtory's color scheme for the TUI. Run hishtory config-set color-scheme to see information on what is customizable and how to do so.
If you'd like to disable the Control+R integration in your shell, you can do so by running hishtory config-set enable-control-r false. If you do this, you can then manually query hiSHtory by running hishtory query <YOUR QUERY HERE>.
By default, hiSHtory query will show all results for your search query. But, it is possible to configure a default filter that will apply to all searches by default. For example, this can be used to configure hiSHtory to only show entries with an exit code of 0:
hishtory config-set default-filter exit_code:0
By default, hishtory query will show all results even if this includes duplicate history entries. This helps you keep track of how many times you've run a command and in what contexts. If you'd rather disable this so that hiSHtory won't show duplicate entries, you can run:
hishtory config-set filter-duplicate-commands true
If you don't need the ability to sync your shell history, you can install hiSHtory in offline mode:
curl https://hishtory.dev/install.py | python3 - --offline
This disables syncing completely so that the client will not rely on the hiSHtory backend at all. You can also change the syncing status via hishtory syncing enable or hishtory syncing disable.
For more information on offline mode, see here.
</blockquote></details> <details> <summary>Self-Hosting</summary><blockquote>By default, hiSHtory relies on a backend for syncing. All data is end-to-end encrypted, so the backend can't view your history.
But if you'd like to self-host the hishtory backend, you can! The backend is a simple go binary in backend/server/server.go (with prebuilt binaries here). It can either use SQLite or Postgres for persistence.
To make hishtory use your self-hosted server, set the HISHTORY_SERVER environment variable to the origin of your self-hosted server. For example, put export HISHTORY_SERVER=http://my-hishtory-server.example.com at the end of your .bashrc.
Check out the docker-compose.yml file for an example config to start a hiSHtory server using Postgres.
A few configuration options:
- If you want to use a SQLite backend, you can do so by setting the
HISHTORY_SQLITE_DBenvironment variable to point to a file. It will then create a SQLite DB at the given location. - If you want to limit the number of users that your server allows (e.g. because you only intend to use the server for yourself), you can set the environment variable
HISHTORY_MAX_NUM_USERS=1(or to whatever value you wish for the limit to be). Leave it unset to allow registrations with no cap.
Beta Feature: The S3 backend
