feat(History): History shared between sessions

[urbaniak]

There should be an option to enable shared history between xonsh instances, ie. executed command in one shell, in another it should be displayed when pressing arrow up, without reloading/restarting.

There's similar thing in zsh, which can be enabled by:

setopt inc_append_history
setopt sharehistory

For community

⬇️ Please click the 👍 reaction instead of leaving a +1 or 👍 comment

[scopatz]

Thanks for reporting @urbaniak! I think that @JohnLunzer may have had a way to do this... If not, this is a feature we'd love to have. Definitely would welcome PRs to this effect.

[urbaniak]

I may start working on that next week cause I'm really missing this feature!

[scopatz]

Please do! Feel free to ask questions too!

[JohnLunzer]

@scopatz I never cracked this one. It would require some micro management of the history files and periodically updating the history object. It was too much for me. Right now I get around this via history xonsh and history xonsh | grep my_search. This would be a welcome feature and I would certainly be on board to look over any PRs.

For the record my previous shell, zsh, did its shared history updates after each command entered at the prompt. I would have to often press enter at the command line to refresh the shared history. I'm only saying this because if this is how you had to do it I would see no shame in it ;) But if you're going to do it this way to keep the prompt responsive you would need to make sure the update is nonblocking.

[scopatz]

Yeah, agreed.

[pando85]

How is state of this issue? Where must I change the code to add this functionality?

I would love this. I come from zsh.

[scopatz]

Take a look in the xonsh.history subpackage. Pull requests very welcome!

[JohnLunzer]

@scopatz, doesn't using the sqlite backend essentially give you a unified history? Maybe I misunderstood how that works.

[nh2]

doesn't using the sqlite backend essentially give you a unified history?

At least history show all shows all terminals' history when sqlite is used, I just tried that.

[nh2]

@Piping I don't understand what you are saying.

[michaelmyc]

Any updates on this issue? Willing to look into it when I have time if nobody's doing it.

[gforsyth]

I don't think anyone is working on it @tydlwav so definitely feel free to take a crack at it. Let us know if you have any questions.

There are currently two history backends. The default is json and creates a history file per shell session. The second is sqlite and I think all sessions write to the same db. I would look there first and see if you can enable the updates across sessions from the sqlite backend.
Doing this with the json backend will require a lot of bookkeeping.
Feel free to ping us with any questions.