verbatim

Shell history stored in SQLite, synced via git.

TODO

• More ergonomic search hook into the shell. Currently I like having Ctrl-R as stock, and running hs when I need to go cross-machine or fuzzy searching.

Install

cd $HOME/dev/vlv
git clone git.meatbag.se:varl/verbatim.git verbatim
mkdir histdb

cd verbatim
go build -o verbatim .

install verbatim ~/bin

Migrate from log files

verbatim import ~/dev/vlv/histdb/

zsh

~/.zshrc:

autoload -Uz compinit promptinit add-zsh-hook

histdb_dir="$HOME/dev/vlv/histdb"

_add_history() {
    if test "$(id -u)" -ne 0; then
        local cmd=$(fc -ln -1)
        cmd=${cmd//$'\n'/\\n}
        verbatim add \
            --timestamp "$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00)" \
            --hostname "$(hostname)" \
            --dir "$(pwd)" \
            -- "$cmd"
    fi
}
add-zsh-hook precmd _add_history

# install hs (interactive search)
install scripts/hs ~/bin

# bind ctrl-r to verbatim search
source /path/to/verbatim/scripts/verbatim-widget.zsh

Usage

verbatim [--db PATH] add --timestamp T --hostname H --dir D -- COMMAND...
verbatim [--db PATH] search [--host H] [--dir D] [--after T] [--before T] [--limit N] [QUERY...]
verbatim [--db PATH] sync [DIR]
verbatim [--db PATH] import DIR
verbatim [--db PATH] stats

Default --db: ~/.local/share/verbatim/history.db

Alternatives

Of course, there are many other shell history tools that are more mature, have more features, solve the same problem in a different way, etc:

• https://github.com/alessandrocarminati/hc
• https://github.com/ddworken/hishtory
• https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

Those are my favourites of the ones I considered before settling on the two legacy shell scripts (later ported to Go -- and expanded on) was the fact that I want to rely on git for syncing, and I don't want to rely on a single server.

And it's hard to beat the <1ms speed of a kernel level >> for appending a command to a file. I've accepted the trade-off of verbatim taking ~2ms to add a record to SQLite.

With Git I can choose to pull from a specific machine, or a centralised forge depending on what I feel like, so I use that for sync.

Legacy

The old shell scripts (search.sh, sync.sh) are kept for backward compatibility during migration. They continue to work with the log files in the git repo.