his

An interactive shell-history search for your terminal, written in Nim. Ditch reaching for Ctrl-R over and over: type to filter, arrow to your command, and press Enter to put it back on the prompt — with favorites to pin the commands you use all the time.

his is a fork of lscd reworked from a directory browser into a history picker.

No fullscreen UI (no alternate screen buffer). The list renders inline as a compact block at your prompt and stays on screen after you exit.

Why this exists

Ctrl-R only searches backward linearly and you have to press it again and again to find what you want. his shows a live, filterable list of your history instead, and lets you favorite the commands you keep retyping.

It is written in Nim, whose compiler first translates code to C and then compiles that, so the binary is roughly the same size as an equivalent C build (here just a few hundred KB — versus multi-MB Rust alternatives). Nim's standard library keeps this dependency-free.

The shell/his.sh wrapper binds his to your Ctrl-R: the chosen command is inserted into the current prompt (editable), and a companion h function runs the chosen command directly.

Features

• Zero dependencies — no external libraries; only the Nim standard library.
• Inline, non-fullscreen TUI — a compact block at your prompt (10 rows by default; override with HIS_LINES=N), no alt-screen takeover.
• Favorites — press Right to pin the selected command, Left to unpin. Stored in ~/.his_history (one per line) and marked with * in the list.
• Two sort modes — Tab toggles between time order and favorites first (favorites bubble to the top, relative order preserved).
• Filter by typing — any key filters case-insensitively; prefix matches rank before substring matches.
• History from anywhere — reads history piped from your shell (so the current session's commands are included) or falls back to $HISTFILE (~/.bash_history) when stdin is a terminal.
• Clean stdout: only the chosen command (no ANSI codes) is printed, so a shell wrapper can safely capture it.

Requirements

• Nim >= 2.2.6
• A POSIX terminal (Linux/macOS) — it uses termios/posix for raw input. Windows is supported via the console API.

Install & build

git clone <repo-url> his
cd his
nimble build

nimble build compiles from src/his.nim and outputs the his binary in the current directory.

Optionally copy the binary into your PATH:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp his ~/.local/bin/

Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH (add the line below to ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, or ~/.profile):

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Shell integration

Add to your ~/.bashrc:

source /path/to/his/shell/his.sh

Then:

• Ctrl-R opens his with your full history (newest first); the chosen command is inserted into the current prompt, ready to edit or run.
• h opens the same picker but runs the chosen command immediately.

his must be on your PATH; override the binary path before sourcing:

export HIS_BIN=/some/other/place/his

Direct usage

his prints the chosen command to stdout and nothing else, so it composes with any pipeline you like:

history | his          # include the current session's commands
his                    # reads $HISTFILE / ~/.bash_history instead

Usage

his
history | his

Keys

Key	Action
Up/Down	Move cursor up/down
Home/End	Jump to first / last entry
Enter	Print selected command and quit
Tab	Toggle sort: time ⇄ favorites first
Right	Add selected command to favorites
Left	Remove selected command from favorites
Backspace	Delete one filter character
Esc/Ctrl+C	Quit without selection
Any key	Filter by substring (case-insensitive)

Configuration

• HIS_LINES=N — max number of history rows to show (default 10).
• ~/.his_history — favorite commands, one per line; edit it freely.

How it works

• Raw terminal input is handled manually via termios (or the Windows console API); escape sequences are parsed to read the arrow keys.
• Rendering goes to stderr, so stdout carries only the chosen command.
• History is read from stdin when it is piped (history | his), so the current session's yet-unflushed commands are searchable too; otherwise it falls back to $HISTFILE. Key input then comes from the controlling terminal (/dev/tty).
• Cursor position is queried (ESC[6n) to anchor the list; each render clears only the rows the widget occupies, so it never clears the whole screen.

License

MIT