Autorefresh Terminal History

README.md

Other gists & tricks: http://caseywatts.com/gists-and-tricks

#Autorefresh Terminal History For giving presentations.

I've been trying to find a way to show an audience the recent terminal commands I've been calling. I can easily imagine doing this in a separate terminal window that just auto-refreshes showing the history of commands recently called.

I decided to try a ruby script! (Bash would be fine too, just comfort)

###Obtaining the history history is the best because it formats it beautifully However, history is a "shell builtin" so we can't access it from ruby or bash scripts. cat ~/.zsh_history does work, but it's littered with timestamps

###Cleaning zsh_history I like timestamps in my zsh_history, so I'm using Ruby code to manually clean it up.

###Looking Ahead If you do, how do you do this?

I bet there's an easier way that works out of the box for more people. I'm just not sure what/where it is.

autohistory.rb

while true
  histo = %x(tail -n 20 ~/.zsh_history)

  # Clean Up, remove timestamps
  histo = histo.split(/\n/)
  histo = histo.map { |h| h[15, h.length] }
  histo = histo.join("\n")

  system 'clear'
  puts histo
  sleep 1
end