brave-history

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

Search Brave browser history from the command-line.

Caveats

This program uses the History sqlite database provided by Chrome. This is not updated immediately. I was getting delays in the order of 8 seconds when I tested this out.

mozeidon seems to give virtually instant data but requires considerably more configuarion than this tool which just works.

Motivation

History is useful; GUIs are irritating; the command-line has a lot of features.

People often remeber information about the pages they have visiting on the internet and then want to refer to it for further work, quote it, or share it. This is one of the values of the history functionality in most browsers, but using the GUI interface that browser provides can be time consuming and fiddly. The command-line has a number of utilities (include custom one's generated by the user) for interacting with data. Additionally the command-line makes it possible to use data once found.

Installation

You can install brave-history from PyPi using pipx.

pipx install brave-history

Usage

To search your history for some terms run:

brave-history github brave

This searches the url and the titleof the page.

brave-history has many flags, some not documented here, you can see this with brave-history --help

Alternatives and prior work

It should be noted that much of the tooling for Chrome can be adapted to Brave.

Brave exposes and sqlite database with history. You may prefer to access this directly for your use cases, particularly if you want to remove dependencies.

mozeidon is a command-line tool with a corresponding browser extension for Chrome which can fetch history, bookmarks and control tabs. I deemed the extension too heavy-weight for my purposes - it requires the installation of a browser extension, two command-line programs, and editing Chrome's configuration files. It does perform certain other functionality such as querying and interacting with tabs where there may be no alternative to using this approach.

References

1. Browsing Chrome history and bookmarks with fzf

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.