OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi, India. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years and lawyering for 10.
Shell history is one of the most useful and powerful tools at your disposal if you spend S a lot of time working with the CLI. While you can easily tweak the settings on your preferred shell to store 500, 2,000, or even more commands, Atuin offers something far superior. It replaces the traditional shell history with a SQLite database, but more importantly, it gives you the ability to sync your CLI history across different machines.
Once installed, Atuin rebinds the Ctrl+r and the up arrow key, used to reverse look up previously executed commands and access the history respectively, with a full-screen history search interface. You can also get stats on the most executed commands, or look up commands based on exit codes and more. Best of all, Atuin doesn’t replace or overwrite your existing history file, so you can revert to it at any time should you find Atuin not to your liking.