Thanks to jcsalterego for the idea and who's already implemented the same thing for bash

About this fork

• intended to search backups for histories and merge everything into 1 unique commands history for quick documentation
• multi line commands work
• use a new backup db when backing up to insure you don't pollute yours with broken commands
• remove the hist file you wanna restore to before writing to it to insure uniqueness
• maybe add some of these to your zshrc to further insure uniqueness (past 100k things can get quite slow so try to keep your total hist size below 50k)

#set history size
export HISTSIZE=100000	        # this must come after sourcing oh-my-zsh!!!
#save history after logout
export SAVEHIST=1000000			# this must come after sourcing oh-my-zsh!!!
#history file
export HISTFILE=$HOME/.zsh_history
#append into history file
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY
#save only one command if 2 common are same and consistent
setopt HIST_IGNORE_DUPS
#add timestamp for each entry
setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY   

setopt HIST_EXPIRE_DUPS_FIRST    # Expire duplicate entries first when trimming history.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_DUPS          # Don't record an entry that was just recorded again.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS      # Delete old recorded entry if new entry is a duplicate.
setopt HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS         # Do not display a line previously found.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE         # Don't record an entry starting with a space.
setopt HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS         # Don't write duplicate entries in the history file.
setopt HIST_REDUCE_BLANKS        # Remove superfluous blanks before recording entry.

Backup and Restore ZSH history

• Simple python script that can backup and restore your zsh history file to a sqlite db
• Dedups commands, and prepends any commands that were in the db but not in the history file
• Accepts a max length parameter
  • This does not truncate your existing file
  • If max length is <= than the size of your existing file, no new commands will be added to your history file
  • Otherwise, it will pull commands based on their timestamps until max length is reached

Running it

usage: ./src/hist.py [-h] [-p PATH] [-d DBNAME] [-m MAXLINES] [-b] [-r]

Backup/Restore zsh history

optional arguments:
  -h, --help               show this help message and exit
  -p PATH,      --path     PATH  path to ZSH history    (default $HOME/.zsh_history)
  -d DBNAME,    --dbname   DBNAME SQLite db path        (default $HOME/.zsh_hist_backup.db)
  -m MAXLINES,  --maxlines MAXLINES max size of history file (default no limit)
  -b, --backup
  -r, --restore

Backup:

./src/hist.py -b

Restore:

./src/hist.py -r

Restoring history every time you open a shell

• Just add the restore command to your ~/.zshrc file! (with the path from $HOME of course)

Backing up your DB

• I've scheduled a launchd task on my mac to push my db to git every evening. Here's a link to the scripts

Feedback and comments welcome!