Normal Search

If you pass in additional arguments to Atuin when you call it, you can filter for exit codes, among other things, which limits the results to commands that completed successfully. In addition, you can control the output by specifying the directories in which the commands were entered. The search can also be restricted to specific time periods (Figure 7). Table 1 shows some Atuin query examples. For more parameters, see the search function documentation on GitHub [9].

Figure 7: You can refine your search results in several ways. Here, the output is restricted to commands that were entered after July 1, 2022, and ended with an exit code of 1.

While it's a bit of a gimmick, the command

atuin stats all

prints an overall statistic and can be restricted to a specific day, for example, by typing

atuin stats day last friday

or by specifying a date (Figure 8). The last row in Table 1 shows how to create a GitHub-style activity graph. However, creating this graph requires registering with the public sync server or running your own server.

Figure 8: The stats command shows how many commands you entered and which you used most often. Here, too, the results can be restricted to a specific time period.

Conclusions

There are many tools that extend the basic history function in different ways. First released in April 2021, Atuin focuses on synchronizing command sequences on different computers. You can use the results globally across all synchronized computers. However, you can also filter your results by computer, the current session, or the directory in which the commands were originally accessed.

Atuin's documentation is still a little sparse, but otherwise it does exactly what it should. Direct support for the tool is available from the Atuin channel on Discord [10], if needed. If you're interested in the way projects like this come about, you can discover more in an interview with Ellie Huxtable, the developer behind Atuin [11].