- Author
- Benjamin Esham
- Published
- 30 May 2025 (last updated October 24, 2026)
- Kind
- Personal blog post with a short code snippet
- Original
- esham.io/2025/05/shell-history
- Subject
- Software tools and craft
What it is
Benjamin Esham writes a personal blog. The post quotes Simon Tatham's article on turning off history. It then offers a function called smite that deletes chosen history entries.
What it says
- The post quotes Simon Tatham, who disables history and saves useful commands elsewhere.
- Esham finds the idea uncomfortable and keeps the last 9,800 commands.
- Esham agrees that recording false starts is useless. Typos and dead ends can trip you up later.
- The smite zsh function opens an fzf browser of history and deletes chosen entries.
- The post says multiline commands are not handled correctly. It credits a Stack Overflow answer by Marlon Richert.
- An update says Eric Nielsen packaged the function into a plugin.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is personal experience and about twenty lines of working zsh code. There are no measurements. The post links a video that was not viewed.
Interests and limits
The post describes one person's workflow. The function was not run here. Esham says multiline commands are not handled correctly. The embedded video was not viewed. The post does not compare tools.