Clojure : 'lein repl' history grepping?

Question

I often find myself executing commands like this at bash :

history | grep 'find'

For example to look up a fancy find / xargs command i might have ran.

Im wondering --- where does the "lein repl" store its historical data ? It would be nice to know, because then I could write a leingrep.sh script, which simply grepped through the lein history session.

It is obvious that this is on disk somewhere, since history is preserved from one repl to the next.

Answer 1

Lein is using either readline (if you have it installed) or jline (if you are so unfortunate, I recommend installing readline). I wouldn't bother trying to look up the history file on disk - just press Ctrl-r, type in your search text, and keep hitting Ctrl-r until you find whatever you were looking for. This is a general readline feature, and will work in any readline app (including bash).

Answer 2

Once you get going with readline there are a couple controls to consider, via your ~/.inputrc file.

I'm not finding the default "history size" documented, but I'm guessing it's only ~100. I often lose some older entries I wished I'd had around. Also, "vi-mode" is wonderful thing for vi users. Together these (with a bonus) in .inputrc become:

set history-size 10000
set editing-mode vi
# Only require 1 tab for completion.
set show-all-if-ambiguous on

Note that this config will affect a lot of repl tools, like gdb, irb/pry, lein, psql, ipython, R, ...