Hmm might be great for some. I’m a Unix philosophy guy, one tool for one job. So far atuin was fine to be a better search history. Now it might be time to look for simpler alternative. Any suggestions? (I’m on zsh)

I tried atuin and then switched back to fzf[0]. It's less features but that's not necessarily a negative.

[0]https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Fzf doesn't let you sync your shell history, though. I self-host an Atuin server so that I can share that history across my various machines.

To be honest I find the things I do on my "work" laptop are different to the things I do on my "personal" laptop, and different again to what I do on my desktop machine.

Regardless of which machine I'm using at any given moment I appreciate having "endless history", and the ability to search/filter it. But despite that I don't think I need to actual sync that.

I'm sure there is value to be had from syncing and making all history unified, but it's never appealed to me particularly.

Yeah, that's part of the "less features" I mentioned. I don't get any value from syncing shell history, but I can see why it's useful for some.

I also self host my own atuin server. It’s great.

I didn’t think syncing terminal history would be very useful until I tried it, but now I have a hard time when I don’t have it.

That was my experience. “Huh, what was that complicate thing I did on the database server?”

I have its search bound to ^r and use Fish shell’s own search for most things, with cross-machine search a keystroke away.

I personally prefer the fzf UX, but I liked atuin's better tracking of history and sync abilities so I combined them: https://github.com/prashantv/atuin-fzf

Yup already using fzf for other things will probably just go back for search history too.

I have to ask -- why? Atuin has not gotten any worse at its core history search functionality. All of the new features are entirely opt-in. Why switch?

Because to me it feels like it gets more complex in ways I don’t like. It’s a matter of preference. To be honest had I not read about it I might have never noticed it but now I know and will probably go back to fzf.

You can try McFly [1] and Television [2]. I still prefer fzf.

[1] https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

[2] https://github.com/alexpasmantier/television

not zsh .. plugging my bash script [1] (and gnome task bar UI) - to start a gnome terminal with a different named history file. [1]: https://github.com/appsmatics/gtsh-hist

What here takes them over the complexity threshold?

AI appears to be opt in

Awesome will try this for sure!

Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.

It has been worsening since Snow Leopard. That is cliched but true.

The author is also the creator of the textual Python library for creating TUIs. The performance benefits of Rust don't seem very useful in a tool where you spend a few seconds typing in a prompt and then 90% of your time is spent waiting. As long as the UI is responsive when typing there wouldn't be much of a difference.

Didn’t know that. Good reason then of course. But I do notice these sort of differences. Codex feels way better than Claude code to me for example.

I tried Toad and to me it feels ridiculously slow and laggy. Switching between input and output (ALT+up/down) for example just lags, I can notice the transition. The whole UI lags. It's no wonder, it's python. Simply the wrong language for this, sorry.

Yeah it feels slow and laggy to me too and I'm not on an old laptop. Running on a M3 Macbook Pro here. I definitely notice the difference between using something like Ghostty (Rust based - super fast) and Toad (Python).

It doesn't really make sense to compare the performance of Ghostty, a terminal emulator, with Toad, a TUI. Also Ghostty is written in Zig, not Rust.

It's obviously way slower though. Also the point stands, it's written in a low-level, performance-oriented language. The author of Toad could have written it in Rust, Zig, C++, etc, but chose Python instead. He valued ease of development versus performance and the result is we get a laggy terminal.

I know for a fact that Textual can generate an entire frame in less than a 60th of a second. Any lag you see has nothing to do with the choice of language. A TUI just doesn’t require that much number crunching to use a low level language.

I’d be interesting in knowing what platform and terminal you observed the lag, when testing Toad.

It is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.

Maybe it's something on my setup then. I notice some delay even though it's by no means huge but noticable. For me these things add up, another example is pane resizing in tmux. I like things snappy, but it's kind of an OCD thing I guess.

The creator of Toad, made a TUI framework in Python (Textual). What is so special about Rust, aside from it being blazingly fast and compiled, that you want from it?

Safety, performance, avoiding python dependency hell.

I tried Toad and to me it feels ridiculously slow and laggy. Switching between input and output (ALT+up/down) for example just lags, I can notice the transition. The whole UI lags. It's no wonder, it's python. Simply the wrong language for this, sorry.

Sure, to each their own. No one forced you to use it, you have a thing called free will, and you can gladly use it.

Hmmm they did charge my CC two days ago on 22nd though…