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

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 - bindings are too slow in bash so they are disabled by default (in bash) when you install resh

  • ✔️ 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 project 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 tried sanitizing your history and you think the result is not sanitized enough then please create an issue or message me.

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.