xontrib-history-looseene 1.2.0

fast small embed history backend

xontrib-history-looseene
A smart, lightning-fast, and feature-rich history backend for the xonsh shell.

Looseene transforms your shell history into a mini search engine. It replaces xonsh's standard history with a compressed, inverted-index backend, enabling instant and relevant search results, even across massive command logs.

🚀 Features

• Interactive Search (Ctrl+R): A powerful full-screen UI to navigate, search, and manage your history.
• Command Execution Counts: Automatically tracks how often you run each command, helping you find your most-used tools.
• Custom Comments: Annotate commands with comments for context (F3 in UI or hs-comment command).
• Prefix Search & Highlighting: Find commands by typing parts of a word (e.g., dist finds distribution), with matches highlighted in yellow.
• Smart & Fast: Uses the BM25 ranking algorithm to find the most relevant commands, not just the most recent. Data is stored in compressed binary segments using mmap, zlib, and struct for instant access.
• Pure Python: No C-extensions or heavy dependencies. It just works.

📦 Installation

Open xonsh and run:

xpip install xontrib-history-looseene

⚙️ Configuration

To activate the backend, add this line to your .xonshrc file (e.g., ~/.config/xonsh/rc.xsh):

xontrib load looseene

Restart your shell. You should see a message Looseene: History backend loaded....

⌨️ Usage

Interactive Search (Ctrl+R)

Press Ctrl+R to open the interactive search window. What you've already typed on the command line will be used as the initial search query.

• Type to search in real-time.
• Up/Down Arrows to navigate results.
• Enter to select a command and place it on your command line.
• F3 to add or edit a comment for the selected command.
• Ctrl+C / Esc to exit; the text you typed in the search bar will be preserved on your command line.

Adding Comments

You can annotate commands with comments for better context, either interactively or from the command line.

1. Interactively (F3): Press F3 while in the Ctrl+R menu to open a dialog and add a comment to the selected command.
2. Via CLI: Use the hs-comment alias.

# Usage: hs-comment <partial_command_to_find> "<your comment>"
hs-comment "docker-compose up" "start project services"

CLI Search

You can also search directly from the command line without the UI:

# Full command
hsearch "docker run"

# Alias
hs "git commit"

Maintenance (Compaction)

Looseene stores history in small "segments" on disk for fast writing. Over time, these can accumulate. To merge all segments into a single, optimized file and finalize metadata (counts and comments):

history-compact

Recommendation: Run this command occasionally to keep performance high.

🛠 Technical Details

• Storage: ~/.local/share/xonsh/looseene_history
• Index Structure: Inverted index with delta-encoded postings lists.
• Backend: Custom implementation inheriting from xonsh.history.base.History.

🛠 Development & Testing

Looseene is designed to be lightweight and dependency-free. You can verify the core search engine logic using only the Python standard library.

Running Core Tests (Zero Dependencies)

No need to install pytest. Simply run the test script directly with Python:

python3 tests/test_native.py

Running Integration Tests

If you have pytest and xonsh installed and want to run the full suite (including xontrib loading tests):

pytest

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

1. Fork the repo.
2. Install in editable mode: xpip install -e .
3. Ensure tests pass: python3 tests/test_native.py
4. Submit a Pull Request.

📄 License

MIT License.