Re: [OT] Not clobbering bash history

[mbork]

On 2023-12-06, at 21:49, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> That makes a kind of sense, but what I would envision is that each
> Bash process has its own history with only the commands of that process.
>
> Why do you prefer the shared history file approach
> to the one-history-per-process approach?

Isn't it obvious?  If I have several terminals open at the same time
(and I seldom have fewer than, say, three, usually more), sharing
history is very useful.  It easy to remember that I issued some kind of
command, but much more difficult to remember in which terminal I did it.
Sharing history lessens my cognitive load.

Also, when I exit bash, the history is written to ~/.bash_history.  So,
if I have two bash sessions, they share the common history from that
file, but not common history from /this session/.  So the "every bash
process has a separate history" is not even true -- /part/ of the
history is shared.  Again, remembering which part adds to the cognitive
load.

Sharing history "live" makes it much simpler.

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
https://mbork.pl