Rich Enhanced Shell History

What

This project is the first phase of my Master project.

It records shell history with rich set of metadata and saves it locally. (device, directory, git, time, terminal session pid, ... see example below)

It doesn't change the way your shell and your shell history behaves.

You won't notice any delay in your shell (~40ms).

If you are not happy with it you can uninstall it with a single command (rm -rf ~/.resh).

Why

The ultimate point of my thesis is to provide a context-based replacement/enhancement for bash and zsh shell history.

The idea is to:

• Save each command with metadata (device, directory, git, time, terminal session pid, ... see example below)
• Recommend history based on saved metadata
  • e.g. it will be easier to get to commands specific to the project you are currently working on (based on directory, git repository url, ...)
• Provide a simple way to search whole history by command itself and/or metadata (e.g. imagine searching by project, directory, device, ...)
• Synchronize history across devices
• Provide an API (to make the project easily extensible)
• And more ...

In order to be able to develop a good history tool I will need to get some insight into real life shell usage patterns.

That's why I ask YOU to install this tool to locally record your shell history.

After some time (probably a few months) I will create a script to replace anything too personal in the recorded data by placeholders.

Then I will ask you to run the script against the recorded data and tell me if you are willing to share the resluts with me.

I'm very thankful for anyone who is willing to support my thesis by providing their usage data!

If you install RESH, please give me some contact info using this form: https://forms.gle/227SoyJ5c2iteKt98

Prereqisities

• git
• golang >1.6 (preferably >1.11)

Installation

Simplest

Just run bash -c "$(wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/curusarn/resh/master/scripts/rawinstall.sh)" from anywhere.

Simple

1. Run git clone https://github.com/curusarn/resh.git && cd resh
2. Run make autoinstall for assisted build & instalation.
   • OR Run make install if you know how to build Golang projects.

If you install RESH, please give me some contact info using this form: https://forms.gle/227SoyJ5c2iteKt98

Compatibility

Works in bash and zsh.

Tested on:

• Arch
• Manjaro
• MacOS
• Ubuntu (18.04)
• really old Ubuntu (16.04)

Examples

Resh history is saved to ~/.resh_history.json

Each line is a JSON that represents one executed command line.

This is how I view it tail -f ~/.resh_history.json | jq or jq < ~/.resh_history.json.

You can install jq using your favourite package manager or you can use other JSON parser to view the history.

Known issues

Q: I use bash on macOS and resh doesn't work

A: You have to add [ -f ~/.bashrc ] && . ~/.bashrc to your ~/.bash_profile.

Long Answer: Under macOS bash shell only loads ~/.bash_profile because every shell runs as login shell. I will definitely work around this in the future but since this doesn't affect many people I decided to not solve this issue at the moment.

Issues

You are welcome to create issues: https://github.com/curusarn/resh/issues

Uninstallation

You can uninstall this project at any time by running rm -rf ~/.resh/

You won't lose any recorded history by removing ~/.resh directory because history is saved in ~/.resh_history.json.