[erlang-questions] Erlang Shell History: enabled.

Joe Armstrong erlang@REDACTED
Tue Nov 22 14:32:22 CET 2011


Hip hip horray - "for he's jolly good fellow, ....

Anything that saves my fingers is good.

This is very nice - this is one of those small improvements that never gets
done, only
now it has been. I don't know how many times I've restarted the shell and
cut and paste
commands from the old shell ...

Works like a charm - now all we need is "search history backwards for
regexp with tab completion -
and dwim mode". I'm a terrible typist so dwimming my inputs would be
fantastic.

Cheers

/Joe


On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Fred Hebert <mononcqc@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> last week I was on a bus after work and decided to keep on going with a
> small project started at the EUC hackathon -- adding shell history to the
> Erlang shell.
>
> I'm presenting the result of the quick hack:
> https://github.com/ferd/erlang-history
>
> It works by storing the lines entered beforehand in a DETS database in
> your home directory (configurable). When you start a VM instance, it loads
> up the old history and puts it into the shell so that the up and down
> arrows let you use older function calls. It doesn't support things like h()
> and v(N), given these have all kinds of weird quirks related to storing
> ephemeral data on disk and loading them back after the fact (ports, refs).
> I also do not support ctrl-r history search, only because that can be
> implemented independently from the history bit.
>
> It does support multiple nodes, should work fine without conflicts and at
> worse will mix in the history between different shell jobs of a single node.
>
> Options include:
>
> - hist - true | false: enables or disables shell history. Default value is
> true
> - hist_file - string(): gives the path to where the history should be
> saved. By default, the file sits in your home directory as
> .erlang-history.$NODENAME. The node name will always be appended to the
> file name as a way to manage conflicts and names.
> - hist_size - 1..N: how many input lines the shell should remember. By
> default, the value is set to 500.
> - hist_drop - ["some", "string", ...]: lines you do not want to be saved
> in the history. As an example, setting hist_drop to
> ["q().","init:stop().","halt()."] will avoid saving most manual ways of
> shutting down a shell. By default, no terms are dropped.
>
> The options are all for the kernel application, so using the 'erl -kernel
> hist_size 120' form or using -config files works.
>
> DETS repairs work in case of a corrupted DB, although you can just drop
> the file altogether if it takes too long. I don't drop files because I
> didn't want to assume anyone did really want their history gone. I figure
> creating a copy could have been fine, but I didn't think that far ahead.
>
> There are no tests at this point. I might add a few of them later in the
> future, testing the logic of a few private functions, but because the
> group.erl file had no tests (that I could quickly find) in OTP, I decided
> to go on with the simplest thing that can work. For this reason (no tests),
> I assume this is *not* something worth submitting as patch to the
> Erlang/OTP team.
>
> Let me know what you think of it. Also: enjoy!
>
> Have a nice day, everyone.
>
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>
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