Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

I just noticed that I have over 650MB of shell history.

Any advice for someone who has less than a megabyte?

Eh, no I'm just a digital packrat.

I started recording every shell command in grad school, when I used to perform extensive data analysis after simulations. Command history helped me audit mistakes to post-mortem how they happened.

But at this point it's just a habit, and probably totally unnecessary.

If you're curious about my setup: <https://lobste.rs/s/zwexdm/centralise_your_bash_history#c_7sneiw>

I used to believe much more strongly in postponing optimization than I do now. And I eventually ended up with a language that required 200k+ memory allocations to add 1+1 in a loop. (<http://akkartik.name/post/wart>)

This feels like a similar discovery. I've been thinking "plain text takes up no space" for a long time. It's shocking that I have accumulated a CD-ROM of it in this one forgotten sub-directory, one keystroke at a time.

Text takes up no space until you type for 900 straight days at 100 WPM. :stuck_out_tongue: