Atuin is lovely, although I found some of its defaults pretty annoying until I changed them:
- It turns out I basically never want fuzzy search through my command history, and certainly not by default. I gave it a try for a couple weeks but it was very frustrating to be searching for a particular command, type in the exact prefix, and have the thing I was looking for hidden among hundreds of irrelevant entries. Solution: search_mode = "fulltext" in Atuin's config.toml
- Having a full screen pop-up appear whenever I hit up was really jarring, especially since I have a habit of hitting up a few times when I'm at the command line thinking of what I need to do next, to sort of refresh my memory on what I was just doing; the popup very effectively destroyed that chain of thought. Solution: eval "$(atuin init bash --disable-up-arrow)" in .bashrc
These are pretty minor issues and it's possible my preferences are just different from most!
Atuin now works really nicely for me. My only outstanding issues are:
- Under mosh the UI ends up corrupting the screen; apparently this is really more of a mosh bug (no alternate screen support) and you can work around it by having tmux/screen running: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/1324
- I still don't have a great model in my head of how sync works and find myself occasionally force-syncing across a few systems until I convince myself everything is in the same state.
- It would be nice to have some kind of settings sync so I don't have to make the config changes mentioned above on 10 different systems. Surprisingly I don't see a feature request for this yet so maybe I'll go open one...
Anyway I don't want these issues to stop people from trying Atuin – it's a really nice piece of software. I almost never make changes to the default environment so I consider it a testament to how useful it is that I've added it to all the systems I use regularly!
I ended up using its compact mode and limiting to a few lines, so instead of taking up my full screen it only takes up a few lines below the prompt. Much more reasonable.
- It turns out I basically never want fuzzy search through my command history, and certainly not by default. I gave it a try for a couple weeks but it was very frustrating to be searching for a particular command, type in the exact prefix, and have the thing I was looking for hidden among hundreds of irrelevant entries. Solution: search_mode = "fulltext" in Atuin's config.toml
- Having a full screen pop-up appear whenever I hit up was really jarring, especially since I have a habit of hitting up a few times when I'm at the command line thinking of what I need to do next, to sort of refresh my memory on what I was just doing; the popup very effectively destroyed that chain of thought. Solution: eval "$(atuin init bash --disable-up-arrow)" in .bashrc
These are pretty minor issues and it's possible my preferences are just different from most!
Atuin now works really nicely for me. My only outstanding issues are:
- Under mosh the UI ends up corrupting the screen; apparently this is really more of a mosh bug (no alternate screen support) and you can work around it by having tmux/screen running: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/1324
- I still don't have a great model in my head of how sync works and find myself occasionally force-syncing across a few systems until I convince myself everything is in the same state.
- It would be nice to have some kind of settings sync so I don't have to make the config changes mentioned above on 10 different systems. Surprisingly I don't see a feature request for this yet so maybe I'll go open one...
Anyway I don't want these issues to stop people from trying Atuin – it's a really nice piece of software. I almost never make changes to the default environment so I consider it a testament to how useful it is that I've added it to all the systems I use regularly!