Portable, extensible history manager for interactive shells and other REPL tools (pxh for short).
pxh's job is to be a reliable and unobtrusive the persistence and search engine for tracking one of the most valuable knowledge vaults you have -- your shell histories. pxh can import your existing history files to give you a head start and provides consistent, on-demand synchronizing across computers.
Key features: - pxh is fast and unobtrusive; once installed, you should never notice it except when you want to conduct a search. - pxh tags history commands with additional context such as the directory, host, and user which lets you store all of your history, not just your primary computer's. It also tracks exit codes and durations. - pxh supports flexible searching to quickly surface relevant and useful entries such as all commands run in a specific directory or commands issued in a given shell session. - pxh provides easy, on-demand synchronization across computers to allow for an "eventually consistent" global view of your interactive shell history.
Quick links: * Basic Usage * Getting started * How it works
Currently pxh supports bash and zsh.
The pxh workflow involves searching history. pxh aims to provide
better performance and ergonomics than history | grep SOME_COMMAND
in addition to ensuring it never misses a history entry. To search
history, use pxh show REGEX or pxh s REGEX.
ffmpeg is a great tool but I never quite remember how to use it.
Fortunately my shell history does:
bash
$ pxh s ffmpeg
...
2022-06-04 07:54:04 ffmpeg -encoders | grep '^ V'
2022-06-07 23:17:33 ffmpeg -y -r 30 -f concat -safe 0 -i <(sed 's/^/file /' /tmp/files) -c:v libx264rgb -preset veryslow -crf 21 -vf fps=30 /tmp/combined.mp4
2022-08-03 10:39:11 ffmpeg -i cropped.mp4 -vf "pad=width=430:height=430:x=215:y=0:color=black" cropped.gif
...
Since pxh was created to simplify history searching, if you tended
to perform sequences of history | grep ... it may be useful to map
those solutions to pxh invocations:
bash
$ pxh s -v history grep
Start Command
2011-08-24 14:51:48 history | grep port | grep install
2012-11-04 09:52:24 history | tail -50 | grep rm
2013-02-02 23:45:06 history | grep ec2-descr
2013-03-27 17:00:42 history | grep qemu
2020-04-02 10:12:52 history | grep gphotos-sync | grep pip
2021-03-29 09:14:34 history | grep squashfuse | grep -i release
Since pxh tracks the directory you issue a command in, and since directories often are a bit of localized context (i.e. when you are working on an open source project), filtering by directory can sometimes be useful. For instance, commands run while hacking on pxh:
bash
$ pxh s --here
Start Command
2023-02-06 22:43:16 cargo test
2023-02-06 22:43:21 cargo build --release
2023-02-06 22:43:25 pxh sync ~/Dropbox/pxh/
2023-02-06 22:44:28 git diff
2023-02-06 22:44:36 cargo clippy
2023-02-06 22:44:42 git commit -a -m 'clippy fixes'
2023-02-06 22:44:44 git push
...
You can view additional details such as the host, directory, duration,
and exit code with the -v flag
bash
$ pxh s -v cargo build
Start Duration Session Context Command
...
2023-02-06 22:10:20 1s 116ef63fc226 . cargo build --release
2023-02-06 22:28:00 2s 116ef63fc226 . cargo build --release
2023-02-07 05:50:02 0s ee6e1989f3da /home/chip cargo build --release
2023-02-07 06:32:04 37s ee6e1989f3da . cargo build --release
...
pxh does the intuitive thing when given multiple search filters: it
finds results that match each filter in consecutive order as separate
words (basically creating a regex by joining the supplied patterns
with .*\s.*, which is a bit unwieldy to type):
bash
$ pxh s git pull
Start Command
...
2023-01-31 11:11:36 git pull --rebase
2023-02-03 08:18:34 fd -t d -d 1 -x git -C {} pull --rebase
2023-02-03 10:44:02 git pull --rebase
...
Finally, sharing history across time and space is easy. Using a
shared storage system like Dropbox or CIFS is easiest, but a directory
you rsync around can work as well. On each computer, just run pxh
sync $DIR:
First computer (nomad):
bash
$ pxh sync ~/Dropbox/pxh/
Syncing from /home/chip/Dropbox/pxh/homebase.db...done, considered 314181 rows and added 5
Saved merged database to /home/chip/Dropbox/pxh/nomad.db
Second computer (homebase):
bash
$ pxh sync ~/Dropbox/pxh/
Syncing from /Users/chip/Dropbox/pxh/nomad.db...done, considered 314236 rows and added 55
Saved merged database to /Users/chip/Dropbox/pxh/homebase.db
Note this can also act as a backup method (as can cp on the pxh
database file).
More advanced usage and flags can be explored via pxh help.
pxh install YOUR_SHELL_NAME
(e.g. zsh).
source <(pxh shell-config YOUR_SHELLNAME)pxh import --shellname zsh --histfile ~/.zsh_histfilepxh import --shellname bash --histfile ~/.bash_historypxh import --shellname zsh --hostname HOST --username root --histfile <(ssh root@HOST cat /root/.zsh_histfile)pxh sync ~/Dropbox/pxh/ which merges from all db files in that
directory and writes a new file with the merged outputpxh uses SQLite to make your history easily searchable you can quickly find useful commands, even from years ago. SQLite is fast, and pxh attempts to use it as efficiently as possible. It is unacceptable if pxh adds noticeable latency to interactive shells and searching for simple cases should be instantaneous.
pxh works using shell helpers to call it before and after every command to log the command, time, exit status, and other useful context. The database is updated in real-time and remains consistent across multiple concurrent shells thanks to SQLite.
The database file is stored, by default, in ~/.pxh/pxh.db. You can
cp this file and examine it with the sqlite3 command line tool.
This tool was originally inspired by bash-history-sqlite and zsh-histdb. These tools, and similar ones, are excellent, but I found myself wanting to extend the concepts further:
mysql, python, etc).This tool embeds the very useful Bash-Preexec utility which provides very zsh-like extensions for Bash to track when commands begin and end.
show option to control output fields
and ordershow to select history entries
restricted to the host, user, etc.