Atuin
A shell history manager that replaces your plain-text bash/zsh history file with a searchable SQLite database, plus optional end-to-end encrypted sync across all your machines.
🔗 Visit Atuin
Description
Shell history in bash or zsh is normally just a flat text file — easy to lose, hard to search well, and completely separate on every machine you use. Atuin replaces that file with a proper searchable database, and if you want, encrypts and syncs it across every computer you work on, so a command you ran on your laptop last week is instantly findable on your work desktop today.
Atuin logs rich metadata with every command — exit code, duration, working directory, hostname — and provides a full-screen fuzzy-search UI (rebindable, Ctrl-R by default) to search across all of it, plus usage statistics. It supports bash, zsh, fish, nushell, xonsh and PowerShell, offers end-to-end encrypted sync via a hosted or self-hosted server, and is free and open source, with 31.4k GitHub stars and very active development.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you've ever wanted to find 'that one command I ran three weeks ago on a different machine,' atuin's synced, searchable history does exactly that — and locally, even without sync, its search UI already beats the default Ctrl-R.
Against your shell's built-in history search, atuin's advantage is depth: searching by exit code, directory, or host, not just a text substring, plus history that survives a wiped machine because it's backed by a real database. Against a simpler tool like fzf-based history search, atuin adds the sync layer, which is the actual differentiator — fzf makes local search nicer but doesn't solve the multi-machine problem at all. The cloud sync is free during its current testing phase but the project is explicit that pricing may change later, and self-hosting the sync server remains a free, permanent option if that matters to you. For anyone who works across multiple machines regularly, the sync alone justifies trying it; for single-machine users, it's still a meaningfully better history search for zero cost.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Usage local 100% gratuit ; synchronisation cloud gratuite en phase de test actuellement (pourrait devenir payante) ; auto-hébergement du serveur de sync toujours gratuit
Pros
Recherche plein écran puissante avec filtres (code retour, répertoire, session)
Synchronisation chiffrée de bout en bout entre machines
100% gratuit en local, auto-hébergement possible
31 400+ étoiles, projet très actif
Support multi-shell (bash, zsh, fish, nushell, PowerShell)
Cons
Tarification de la sync cloud susceptible d'évoluer après la phase de test
Nécessite une intégration shell et une configuration initiale
Approche par base de données différente de l'historique texte classique