atuin Documentation

1. Project Overview & Quickstart (atuinsh/atuin) Copy Chapter

Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records
additional context for your commands. Additionally, it provides optional and
fully encrypted synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin
server.

As well as the search UI, it can do things like this:

# search for all successful `make` commands, recorded after 3pm yesterday
atuin search --exit 0 --after "yesterday 3pm" make

You may use either the server I host, or host your own! Or just don't use sync
at all. As all history sync is encrypted, I couldn't access your data even if
I wanted to. And I really don't want to.

Features Copy Chapter

• rebind ctrl-r and up (configurable) to a full screen history search UI
• store shell history in a sqlite database
• back up and sync encrypted shell history
• the same history across terminals, across sessions, and across machines
• log exit code, cwd, hostname, session, command duration, etc
• calculate statistics such as "most used command"
• old history file is not replaced
• quick-jump to previous items with Alt-<num>
• switch filter modes via ctrl-r; search history just from the current session, directory, or globally
• enter to execute a command, tab to edit

Documentation Copy Chapter

• Quickstart
• Install
• Setting up sync
• Import history
• Basic usage

Supported platforms Copy Chapter

Atuin supports zsh, bash, fish, nushell, xonsh, and PowerShell. See
Supported platforms for the full matrix
and what each tier means.

Community Copy Chapter

Forum Copy Section

Atuin has a community forum, please ask here for help and support: https://forum.atuin.sh/

IRC Copy Section

We're also available via #atuin on libera.chat

Discord Copy Section

Atuin also has a community Discord, available here

Quickstart

This will sign you up for the Atuin Cloud sync server. Everything is end-to-end encrypted, so your secrets are safe!

Read the docs for an offline setup, self-hosted server, and more.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://setup.atuin.sh | sh

atuin register -u  -e 
atuin import auto
atuin sync

Then restart your shell!

[!NOTE]

For Bash users: The above sets up bash-preexec for necessary hooks, but
bash-preexec has limitations. For details, please see the
Bash
section of the shell plugin documentation.

Related projects

• Catpuccin for Atuin
• eshell-atuin
• mob (tiny creatures in your terminal)

Please open a PR for any others!

Contributors

Made with contrib.rocks.

2. Official Technical Reference & Guides (atuinsh/docs) Copy Chapter

Atuin docs

This powers docs.atuin.sh - the unified documentation site for Atuin CLI and Atuin Desktop.

This site uses MkDocs with the Material theme and the mkdocs-multirepo-plugin to pull documentation from multiple repositories.

Documentation sources Copy Chapter

• Atuin CLI: Documentation lives in the atuinsh/atuin repository under docs/
• Atuin Desktop: Documentation lives in the atuinsh/desktop repository under docs/

Local development Copy Chapter

# Install dependencies
uv sync

# Run local dev server
uv run mkdocs serve

# Build the site
uv run mkdocs build

Contributing Copy Chapter

To contribute to the documentation:

• For Atuin CLI docs, submit PRs to atuinsh/atuin
• For Atuin Desktop docs, submit PRs to atuinsh/desktop
• For site-wide changes (navigation, theme, etc.), submit PRs to this repository