[web007]

Curation is probably a good idea, but keeping context is probably a better idea.

The referenced "I don't keep history" philosophy is madness. You won't know what thing would have been useful to keep until you need it $later. Sure, you'll write down some good stuff and maybe alias it.

That's fantastic, do more of that anyway.

Don't pretend you're going to do that for every trick or gotcha you encounter, and don't think you're going to remember that one-off not-gonna-need-it thing you did last week when you find that bug again.

My local history is currently 106022 lines, and that's not even my full synchronized copy, just this machine. It's isolated per-session and organized into ~/.history/YYYY/MM/machine_time_session hierarchy. It has 8325 "git status", 4291 "ll", 2403 "cd .." and 97 "date" entries which don't matter. Literal/complete entries, not including variations like "date +%Y%m%d" which are separate. I can ignore them, either by grepping them out or filtering mentally, but something as benign as "cd .." is INCREDIBLY useful to establish context when I'm spelunking through what I did to debug a thing 2 years ago.

The even better version of both of these variants is to keep everything AND curate out useful stuff. That whole history (4 years locally) is 10MB, and my entire history compressed would be less than a megabyte.

Edit: just realized who posted this, I overlapped with Tod at my first gig in Silicon Valley. Small world!

[abathur]

I think it's a byproduct of how macOS itself saves and restores window state, but the macOS Terminal.app has options to control restoring scrollback on reopen. History is good, but it's really great to be able to scroll back and see more context around the commands I was running. (This can still fail me. In a rarely-touched tab I might have years of scrollback, but I currently have it set to restore 10k lines and I may find there's only a few days or hours in a tab where I ran something noisy with verbose logging...)