Screenshots

With the ShellHistory you can easily keep years of shell history, search history using Full Text Search, back it up to iCloud, create Notebooks.

With ShellHistory you can:

• Run full-text search queries over your shell history.
• Extend your shell history by including information about the working directory, session, elapsed time, exit code, host, user, and more.
• Never lose your shell history. Backup and synchronize it between Macs using your private iCloud storage.
• Organize commands in notebooks to easily access the everyday workflow.
• Import existing shell history.
• See a complete terminal session in the order of the commands executed.
• Dark and light mode support.
• Multi-windows, multi-tabs support.

Search Syntax

ShellHistory uses SQLite as a storage, and leveraging FTS5 engine for search. You can read more about FTS5 syntax at SQLite FTS5 Extension

There are 4 columns that ShellHistory is using for search:

• cmd - the shell command
• pwd - the working directory
• user - the username
• host - the host (useful if you are syncing history between multiple Macs)

Examples:

• git - searching term git in all the columns
• ^git - searching term git in the beginning of the column values
• gi* - searching terms that start with gi in all the columns
• "rm fr" - searching two terms that NEAR, search matches rm fr and rm -fR, but not rm --recursive -fR
• git AND commit - search for two terms in the columns, both terms should present
• git OR svn - search for two terms in the columns, at least one of the terms should present
• git NOT commit - search for term git but without term commit
• svn OR (git NOT commit) - use parentless to combine boolean operators
• cmd:git pwd:src - specify columns where you want to search for terms
• -pwd: src AND docker - exclude column “pwd” from search

FAQ

How does it work?

ShellHistory includes a tiny CLI tool shhist that integrates with the shell’ prompt and writes the history in the database. ShellHistory provides the instructions how to integrate shhist with zsh, bash or fish. Integration does not change or break your custom prompt.

Do I need to run ShellHistory in foreground to synchronize via iCloud?

After you enable synchronization with iCloud, ShellHistory starts a tiny Background application, that backups and synchronize history and notebooks in the background. You don’t need to run ShellHistory all the time.

Can I search from terminal?

Absolutely! You can use shhist search in terminal to find a command you are looking for. That would allow you also to integrate with Alfred and similar tools if you need it.

If you want to open ShellHistory from terminal just use shhist search-ui.

I see a sudo command in your prompt integration. Is it safe?

The reason why we run shhist with sudo is to lower the user back to regular user, if you are in the sudo session. Reason is simple, if you are running commands with root user we don’t want to break permissions on the ShellHistory database.

How large my history can be?

At the time when I created ShellHistory I already had close to 100,000 commands in my history.

Is my information safe?

By default, every shell writes history in the text file under your home directory. ShellHistory does something similar, only writes it in sqlite database. ShellHistory and shhist util are both sandboxed applications, and only have access to small amount of data folders, that are available for them.

If you by accident leaked a password in the history, you can easily find this command and delete it. Similarly, how you would do with regular history in the shell you are using.

You can also configure a regular expression pattern, that can tell Shell History which commands to ignore.

If you enabled iCloud synchronization, ShellHistory uses your private iCloud database, so only people with access to your AppleID will be able to access it.

Does ShellHistory captures remote sessions (ssh)?

Not at this moment. It only captures ssh command itself, but nothing you enter on the remote session. You can always use the import command to do it manually, but there is no automatic support for that. I am not planning yet to implement support for it.

Please take a look at the list of alternatives below if this is important for you.

Is the trial available?

You can purchase ShellHistory from App Store, and request a refund if you don’t like it. You can request a refund from Apple Support.

Not sure about ShellHistory, could you recommend alternatives?

• dbhist - a shell script that I wrote in 2017 and used since then before I switched to ShellHistory.
• Atuin - open source, cli tool.
• iTerm2 - iTerm2 has shell integration with history

How to troubleshoot the error shhist could not parse inserted string?

shhist tries to autodetect the shell based on the SHELL variable, sometimes it might not be set correctly, if your login shell is different, and you launched shell session from terminal. You can run shhist insert --help and see what is set by default for the --shell.

One way to fix it, is to use chsh to actually change your login shell. Another way, you can force and tell shhist which shell you are using with a switch --shell ....

One more issue could be with the history built-in command, if that is an alias, it might not behave as expected. You can check it with type history, it should say history is a shell builtin, if it is something different, please use \ in front of the history command in your configuration like \history that will call the built-in command instead of your alias.

Privacy Policy

We believe very strongly in our customers right to privacy. Our customer records are not for sale or trade, and we will not disclose our customer data to any third party except as may be required by law.

Any information that you provide to us in the course of interacting with our sales or technical support departments is held in strict confidence. This includes your contact information (including, but not limited to your email address and phone number), as well as any data that you supply to us in the course of a technical support interaction.

Support

Please email us any suggestions, ideas, questions or discovered bugs to support@loshadki.app