Comment by noroot - Hacker Neue

noroot Mar 21, 2023 parent

I wanted to like atuin. The idea is great. But it just could not match the instant search that ctrl-r with fzf offers sadly. There is always a noticeable delay that annoyed me and made me revert back to fzf for search.

For me another issue was that I needed to do more keystrokes for the same behaviour (search a previously ran command and execute it).

Fuzzy shell history search is just one of those mind-blowing things. I love my history, it's such a trove and I can trust it to work as some kind of external memory (it's enough to vaguely know the kubectl command, or that I want to "du -h | sort" to see what is using disk space, etc).

psYchotic Mar 21, 2023

I also had a rather noticeable delay when launching atuin. As it turns out, this was because it checked for an update every time it launched! You can disable that update check: add a ` update_check = false` to your `~/.config/atuin/config.toml` [1]. That made the delay pretty much disappear for me.

[1]: https://atuin.sh/docs/config/#update_check

MayeulC Mar 21, 2023

What? I don't expect any tool to interact with the network if it's not made specifically for this (curl, netcat, etc). This would betray my expectations, I find it unacceptable.

conradludgate Mar 21, 2023

It's one of our key features

> backup and sync encrypted shell history

But it's up to you. You can disable any sync features by installing with `--no-default-features --features client` set. Your application won't have any networking features built into the binary then

conradludgate Mar 21, 2023

We actually fixed the delay issue, but since you disabled update checking you wouldn't have known to update!

It was quite annoying so we're sorry for that

psYchotic Mar 21, 2023

Oh, it's nice you fixed it, thanks! And don't worry, I updated atuin, as it's in my distro's repository (which is why I wasn't worried about disabling the update check).

pmarreck Mar 21, 2023

How would you compare this to, say, McFly? https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

reddit_clone Mar 21, 2023

Intrigued by local-directory-first feature of McFly (It brings up commands you previously executed in that folder first). I tried it for a bit. But there was noticeable lag compared to FZF and also the UI was a bit shaky.

Went back to FZF (in Zsh).

I have a seven year zsh history. That may be a contributing factor for the issues ?

conradludgate Mar 21, 2023

Not too different.

* We use heuristic based searches whereas mcfly trains a neural network * We offer a sync functionality to share history on multiple machines

mcfly is a great project, although they are looking for new maintainers apparently!

jyxent Mar 22, 2023

I noticed that before and am glad to see it fixed. My current issue is that typing to search is noticeably slow on a 150,000 entry history, especially for the first few characters. fzf is instant for me.

ellieh Mar 21, 2023

Yeah we accidentally had this blocking :/ It does only check once an hour though, and can totally be disabled!

We introduced this as we found a lot of people reporting bugs that had already been fixed + they just needed to update, or users on the sync server that were >1yr behind on updates (making improvements really difficult to introduce).

nikvdp Mar 22, 2023

Same, I enjoyed atuin but found myself missing fzf's fuzzy search experience so I ported fzf's own ctrl-r zsh widget to read from atuin instead of the shell's history to solve this. Best of both worlds imo, you get fzf's fuzzy search experience and speed with atuin's shell history management and syncing functionality.

Zsh snippet below in case it's helpful to anybody. With this in your .zshrc ctrl-r will search your shell history with fzf+atuin and ctrl-e will bring up atuin's own fuzzy finder in case you still want it.

It only searches the last 5000 entries of your atuin history for speed, but you can tweak ATUIN_LIMIT to your desired value if that's not optimal.

    atuin-setup() {
        if ! which atuin &> /dev/null; then return 1; fi
        bindkey '^E' _atuin_search_widget

        export ATUIN_NOBIND="true"
        eval "$(atuin init "$CUR_SHELL")"
        fzf-atuin-history-widget() {
            local selected num
            setopt localoptions noglobsubst noposixbuiltins pipefail no_aliases 2>/dev/null

            # local atuin_opts="--cmd-only --limit ${ATUIN_LIMIT:-5000}"
            local atuin_opts="--cmd-only"
            local fzf_opts=(
                --height=${FZF_TMUX_HEIGHT:-80%}
                --tac
                "-n2..,.."
                --tiebreak=index
                "--query=${LBUFFER}"
                "+m"
                "--bind=ctrl-d:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts -c $PWD),ctrl-r:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts)"
            )

            selected=$(
                eval "atuin search ${atuin_opts}" |
                    fzf "${fzf_opts[@]}"
            )
            local ret=$?
            if [ -n "$selected" ]; then
                # the += lets it insert at current pos instead of replacing
                LBUFFER+="${selected}"
            fi
            zle reset-prompt
            return $ret
        }
        zle -N fzf-atuin-history-widget
        bindkey '^R' fzf-atuin-history-widget
    }
    atuin-setup

rofrol Mar 22, 2023

Thanks, just needed to set `CUR_SHELL=zsh` to make it work. Also `brew install atuin fzf`

conradludgate Mar 21, 2023

As I put in a child reply, that delay should be fixed.

But if you can't get past the double-enter, then I understand.

I think there was some work to fix that, I'll check up on it. Thanks for the reminder

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