Skip to content

hex

Atuin Hex is an experimental lightweight PTY proxy, providing new features without needing to replace your existing terminal or shell. Atuin Hex currently supports bash, zsh, fish, and nu.

TUI Rendering

The search TUI exposes a tradeoff: the UI is either in fullscreen alt-screen mode that takes over your terminal, or inline mode that clears your previous output. Neither is great.

With Hex, we can have our cake AND eat it too. The Atuin popup renders over the top of your previous output, but when it's closed we can restore the output successfully.

Initialization

Atuin Hex needs to be initialized separately from your existing Atuin config. Place the init line shown below in your shell's init script, as high in the document as possible, before your normal atuin init call.

eval "$(atuin hex init zsh)"

eval "$(atuin hex init bash)"

Add

atuin hex init fish | source

to your is-interactive block in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish file

Run in Nushell:

mkdir ~/.local/share/atuin/
atuin hex init nu | save -f ~/.local/share/atuin/hex-init.nu

Add to config.nu, before the regular atuin init:

source ~/.local/share/atuin/hex-init.nu
Nushell's source command requires a static file path, so you must pre-generate the file.

If the atuin binary is not in your PATH by default, you should initialize Hex as soon as it is set. For example, for a bash user with Atuin installed in ~/.atuin/bin/atuin, a config file might look like this:

export PATH=$HOME/.atuin/bin:$PATH
eval "$(atuin hex init bash)"

# ... other shell configuration ...

eval "$(atuin init bash)"