shist

A small TUI for picking commands out of your shell history and copying them to the clipboard. Targets bash primarily; zsh is supported the same way.

How it works

• In bash/zsh, after sourcing the shell integration (recommended): shist is a shell function that pipes your shell's own history builtin into the tool. That's the live, in-memory history of the current session, including anything you typed that hasn't been flushed to a history file yet.
• Standalone (no shell integration, or in a shell without a history builtin): running shist directly reads a history file instead — --file PATH, or $HISTFILE, or ~/.bash_history / ~/.zsh_history depending on --shell/$SHELL. This can miss very recent commands the live shell hasn't written to disk yet.

Install

pip install shist

Then add the shell integration to your .bashrc and/or .zshrc:

eval "$(shist --print-shell-init)"

Open a new shell (or source your rc file) and run shist.

Using it

There are three panels; Tab cycles through them: search → history → selection → back to search. This keeps typing fully separate from the single-key list commands — c, d, -, [, ] are always literal query text while you're in the search panel, and only act as commands once you've tabbed into history or selection.

Search (active on start):

• Type to filter (fuzzy substring match); Backspace edits it.
• ↑/↓ (Ctrl+P/Ctrl+N) still browse the history list live; Shift+↑/Shift+↓ page through it.
• Tab moves to the history panel.

History panel (browse & add):

• ↑/↓ move the highlight, not wrapping past either end; Shift+↑/Shift+↓ move a page at a time.
• c adds the highlighted command to the selection, at the end.
• Tab moves to the selection panel.

Selection panel (the running list of what you've added, in order):

• ↑/↓ move the highlight, not wrapping past either end; Shift+↑/Shift+↓ move a page at a time.
• d or - removes the highlighted entry.
• [ / ] move the highlighted entry earlier/later.
• Tab moves back to search.

Any panel:

• Enter confirms: copies the selection, newline-joined in order; with nothing added, copies just the highlighted history entry.
• Esc / Ctrl+C cancels without copying anything.

Known limitations

• A custom HISTTIMEFORMAT in bash gets treated as part of the command text when reading piped history output — not specially parsed out.
• Plain POSIX sh/dash has no history builtin, so there's no live-history mode for it; only the standalone/file-fallback mode applies.