vizshhist

Edit your zsh_history file with a text editor.

Bash's history file, .bash_history, is just a list of commands even if a command contains multi-byte strings, thus it is editable with a text editor. But Zsh's history file, .zsh_history, uses some magical encoding, called metafy, for some non-ascii characters. This prevents us from editing the history file with a text editor. If you attempt to edit the history file with a text editor directly, your command history will be broken.

This tool decodes zsh_history file to a temporary file and then launches the text editor. After closing the text editor, this tool automatically encodes and writes zsh_history file back.

Install

from pre-built binaries

Download a tar ball from the releases page, extract the vizshhist file, and copy it to a directory in $PATH such as /usr/local/bin.

• For x86-64 (amd64) GNU/Linux system: vizshhist-*-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
• For aarch64 (arm64) GNU/Linux system: vizshhist-*-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz

from source code

cargo install --git https://github.com/ytoku/vizshhist.git

Usage

To edit ~/.zsh_history:

vizshhist

To edit a specific file:

vizshhist filename

Configuration

The configuration file is:

• GNU/Linux: ~/.config/vizshhist/config.toml
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/vizshhist/config.toml

You can specify a command to run your text editor in editior option.

[vizshhist]
editor = "/usr/bin/vim --cmd 'set fileencodings=utf-8'"

If editor option is not set in the configuration file, vizshhist checks VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables. Moreover if these environment variables are not set, vizshhist uses the first command found from the following list: /usr/bin/editor, /usr/bin/vi, /usr/bin/nano.