[kstrauser]

All that jumps out to me from that page is sync, which is nice, but not life-changing.

I guess I’m looking for more of a personal experience anecdote, where someone could explain how its other features made it worth signing up for another sync service and learning a new thing. It may be the best thing since sliced bread but that page doesn’t say why I should try it.

[joh6nn]

- all the data is stored in a sqlite db, so it's actually structured, as opposed to just being in an adhoc text format

- this matters because it's capturing not just what commands were run, but metadata about the commands as well. Of particular interest to me is that ot captures the start and end time for every history entry so you can get timing data even if you forget to use `time`

- it provides much more fine-grained control over what makes it into the database than shells provide for controlling what makes it into their built-in history. For example, it has built-in support for filtering out common kinds of secrets/tokens/etc.

It's also in active development with a friendly and helpful creator/project lead, an active community, and an ever growing feature set.

I'd recommend giving it a try; as far as I'm concerned, it's best-in-class for managing shell history

[alchemist1e9]

> Of particular interest to me is that ot captures the start and end time for every history entry so you can get timing data even if you forget to use `time`

That’s potentially an incredible useful feature to integrate with all that metadata! Very very interesting.

[perrygeo]

Fair point, I've been using atuin for a few years on a few machines but never once felt the need to set up sync. I forgot sync was even a feature! It's certainly over-emphasized on the web page.

I use it mainly because a) it stores data about command history in a proper database that's easy to query (what century is this? How do other tools justify dumping what should be structured information into some god-awful mess of semi-structured text files?) and b) it makes a clean separation between SESSION, DIRECTORY and GLOBAL scopes which means you can explicitly use a recency or a locality filter (I don't want irrelevant commands cluttering my history).

Even without sync, atuin is a gem.

[samwho]

For me, syncing across machines and other shell sessions was enough to justify shelling out the $0 and 5 minutes it took to install and learn the tool.

[m-GDEV]

I just watched this video: https://youtu.be/WB7qojkkVVU?si=_sqnKlXrblLSwrs8 and there still seems to be nothing that stands out about atuin. I do think it might be easier to work with the data in a database. Personally I don't see a reason to use this service .

[cstrahan]

As I commented elsewhere, you can:

- Filter by commands run within the current shell session

- Filter by commands run within the current working directory

- Filter by commands run across hosts (as opposed to filtering commands run on your local machine)

- Filter by commands run within the current shell session

- All of the above searching functionality, with nice fuzzy finding support, time stamps, etc.

Before atuin I used zsh's builtin history, with ctrl+r rebound to present that builtin history through the `fzf` fuzzy finding tool, and zsh configured to share history across shells. The deficiencies I found: I couldn't optionally filter by commands _only_ run in the current shell, I couldn't filter by commands run in the current directory (useful for quickly finding commands I often need to re-run for a given project), and I can't search for commands run across hosts.

If you don't find yourself valuing these things, you may find that you have little to gain from using atuin.