resh/README.md

Rich Enhanced Shell History

Context-based replacement/enhancement for zsh and bash shell history

⚠️ Work in progress

Motivation

When you exectue a command in zsh or bash following gets recorded to your shell history:

• Command itself
• Date
• Duration of the command (only in zsh and only if enabled)

But shell usage is contextual - you probably use different commands based on additional context:

• Current directory
• Current git repository/origin
• Previously executed commands
• etc ...

Additionally it's annoying to not have your shell history follow you accros your devices. Have you lost you history when reinstalling? I personally think this is unacceptable in 2019.

Why not synchronize your shell history accross your devices and add some metadata to know where it came from:

• Hostname
• Username
• Machine ID

What this project does

Legend:

• ✔️ Implemented
• ✅ Implemented but there are issues
• ❌ Not implemented
• 💤 Future ideas - no short-terms plans to implement it
• ☕ Working on it!

NOTE: Features can change in the future

• Record shell history with metadata

  • save it as JSON to ~/.resh_history.json
  • save it to a database so we don't have to keep it all in memory

• Provide bindings for arrow keys

  • imitate default behaviour (at first)
  • provide enhanced behaviour
  • save additional metadata (e.g. command was recalled using arrow keys)

• Provide an application like hstr that allows searching history records based on both the command and metadata

  • provide binding for Control+R

• Synchronize recorded history between devices

• Provide an API to make it possible to write other tools that use the recorded history

• Show cool graphs based on shell history

• Provide a tool to sanitize the recorded history

• Be compatible with zsh and bash

• Be compatible with Linux and macOS

Data sanitization and analysis

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

This is also my Master thesis so I need to be a bit scientific and base my design decisions on evidence/data.

Running reshctl sanitize creates a sanitized version of recorded history.
In sanitized history, all sensitive information is replaced with its SHA1 hashes.

If you would consider supporting my research/thesis by sending me a sanitized version of your history then please give me some contact info using this form: https://forms.gle/227SoyJ5c2iteKt98

Prereqisities

Standard stuff: bash, curl, tar, ...

Additional prerequisities: bash-completion (if you use bash)

Installation

Simplest

Run this command.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/curusarn/resh/master/scripts/rawinstall.sh | bash

Simple

1. Run git clone https://github.com/curusarn/resh.git && cd resh
2. Run scripts/rawinstall.sh

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.