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Advanced Usage

Atuin offers you several options to help navigate through the results.

Filter mode

The command history can be filtered in different ways, letting you narrow the search scope.

You can cycle through the different modes by pressing ctrl-r.

The available modes are:

Mode Description
global (default) Search from the full history
host Search history from this host
session Search history from the current session
directory Search history from the current directory
workspace Search history from the current git repository
session-preload Search from the current session and the global history from before the session start

See the filter_mode config reference for more details.

Search mode

Atuin offers different modes to interpret your search query.

You can cycle through the different modes by pressing ctrl-s.

The available modes are:

Mode Description
fuzzy (default) Search for commands in a fuzzy way, similar to the fzf syntax
prefix Commands that start with your query
fulltext Commands that contain your query as a substring
skim Search for commands using the skim syntax

See the search_mode config reference for more details.

Context switch

Atuin uses the current context (host, session, directory) to filter the history when you use a filter mode other than global.

You can switch this context to the one of the currently selected command by pressing ctrl-a then c.

This will set the filter mode to session and clear the search query, which will show you all the commands executed in the same shell session.

Pressing this key combination again will return to the initial context. You can customize this behavior by setting custom key bindings to the switch-context and clear-context commands. switch-context can be called several times to navigate through multiple command contexts, while clear-context will always return to the initial context.