One of the things I love about tools like zsh, tmux and vim is the amount of configuration that can be set on them to suit your needs. Today I spend some time to enhance my history configuration in zsh and it has paid off.
Let’s start with how much I want to save:
HISTSIZE=1000000 # Set the amount of lines you want saved
SAVEHIST=1000000 # This is required to actually save them, needs to match with HISTSIZE
HISTFILE=~/.zhistory # Save them on this file
This is a very big history file, be sure it matches your computer capabilities since all of it is saved in memory.
At first this was fine but I notice a few things:
- My history was not set into the file until I closed the zsh shell.
- There was a big amount of duplicate commands.
To fix this I added these variables:
setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY # Write the history file in the ":start:elapsed;command" format.
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY # Write to the history file immediately, not when the shell exits.
setopt SHARE_HISTORY # Share history between all sessions.
setopt HIST_EXPIRE_DUPS_FIRST # Expire duplicate entries first when trimming history.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_DUPS # Don\'t record an entry that was just recorded again.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS # Delete old recorded entry if new entry is a duplicate.
setopt HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS # Do not display a line previously found.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE # Don\'t record an entry starting with a space.
setopt HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS # Don\'t write duplicate entries in the history file.
setopt HIST_REDUCE_BLANKS # Remove superfluous blanks before recording entry.
All of these options should be saved in your ~/.zshrc file for them to work.
Finally I wanted to comment about plugins that do a lot for you, like the famous oh-my-zsh, because they have so much setup already, you will probably end up using a very small set of it, I personally prefer the approach of I have a problem, let’s search/build a fix on which you have time to learn and understand what suits you best.