dotfiles

My dot files

This stores some linux configuration files.

TODO : Fix bash history !!!

BREAKING NEWS: "Bashhub saves every terminal command entered across all sessions and systems ..." https://github.com/rcaloras/bashhub-client

As a user I want my command line history to just WORK !!!

That means when I type a command, it gets added to the history and persisted.
Even if I turn off the computer after that.
And it should work when I open several terminals, even from different emulators.
That means:

before the command, clear the memory, reload from disk
after the command, (I expect it to be added to the memory), write to disk

The problem

There is important stuff defined in .profile that gets overwritten by .bashrc.
The .bashrc file is created by the distro, from a template in /etc/skel/.bashrc.
Very bad news, this changes both HISTxxx variables and PROMPT_COMMAND in a way that breaks history !
So this is probably the first thing to fix when setting up a new machine to make sure the history is recorded correctly.

To make this worse, the fix is probably different for each terminal !

To understand the problem, read and re-read this article until you understand it. TLDR: .profile is loaded only at login time (at startup or when remote via ssh) but .bashrc is loaded each time bash starts.

Elementary Terminal

Elementary puts its own stuff in PROMPT_COMMAND so the usual solution probably does not apply.
The scripts below allow to define HOOK commands and could be used to get the correct behavior:

Wezterm

Wezterm includes a COPY of the above mentioned HOOK scripts !
See /etc/profile.d/wezterm.sh for details.
So any fix should first check if bash is running in wezterm before trying to load bash-preexec.
With a bit of luck, appending a function call to the HOOKs could work the same in all cases.

#test1() { history -r; }
flush_and_reload_history() { history -a; history -c; history -r; }

#precmd_functions+=(test1);

preexec_functions+=(flush_and_reload_history);

Alacritty

It seems alacritty does nothing special so both setting PROMPT_COMMAND and using bash-preexec should work fine.

Nushell : a new hope ?

Install requires quite some dependancies ...
https://www.nushell.sh/book/installation.html#build-from-source
UPDATE: nu history works as expected out of the box !
And the history file goes to the same folder as the config files.

TODO bash function instead of alias for git ?

https://gist.github.com/me7/e19805c0e6f27d9273b0

More TODO

Terminal: Choose between Wezterm, Alacritty and Kitty
Multiplexer : Wezterm, Zellij or even tmux
Shell : bash, nushell or even PowerShell (?!)

PowerShell Get-History works no better, but there is PSReadLine which really stores everything.
PSReadLine is installed by default, but there does not seem to be any command to use the history directly.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/psreadline/about/about_psreadline?view=powershell-7.2

Just in case:

Even more TODO: use etckeeper ?

http://etckeeper.branchable.com/ https://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/from-zero-to-nunit-with-visual-studio-code

Prerequisites

Usage

Clone this in $HOME
Remove any existing .bash_aliases, .profile, .vimrc or .vim file/directory
In $HOME/dotfiles, run stow bash, stow fzf and stow vim

blabaere/dotfiles