Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell

cenanozen 88 points 73 comments March 21, 2026
blog.atuin.sh · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (14 comments)

GardenLetter27

Atuin is great. This, fish, LazyGit, and zellij are mandatory for me now.

rahimnathwani

Atuin AI sounds like a useful addition. The page suggests they're probably using hosted models: We use the latest frontier models, which already do a good job of generating commands using well-known binaries and CLIs. On top of that, we integrate a dataset powered by man pages and command outputs to ensure you get the correct command first. This is great, but does it mean we'll need to log in somehow? It doesn't seem reasonable to expect the project maintainers to pay for the tokens. EDIT: I was unaware of Atuin's 'hub' which does things like sync your shell history across computers. I think they use the same sign-in as they already use for that: https://hub.atuin.sh/register

lta

Why does every tool on the face of earth try to add AI features ? Good tools are simple and orthogonal. If you want AI, there's already plenty of other tools doing it probably better. I'm overall fairly disappointed by this announcement. This IMHO doesn't bode well

dc_giant

Hmm might be great for some. I’m a Unix philosophy guy, one tool for one job. So far atuin was fine to be a better search history. Now it might be time to look for simpler alternative. Any suggestions? (I’m on zsh)

colesantiago

As soon as a tool adds pricing, price increases or adds AI that's when it begins to be enshittified. Why does this happen mostly?

mpalmer

I was already turned off by their decision to remove support for fzf, which I use everywhere else. I'm done.

duskdozer

I was really pleased finding this last year, but I guess it's time to look for an alternative. I don't get why everything has to have AI shoved into it

theusus

All I want is auto complete for the commands on Windows. And none provides

Myzel394

I'm still looking forward to being able to only remember a command for a specific time. I currently block sensitive commands, which completely destroys the ability to just press the up arrow key to quickly edit the command. If we had like a timeout of 1 minute for sensitive commands, we could edit them and still make sure they are not persistent

semiquaver

I’m baffled by how bitter and angry the comments are. Atuin is one of my favorite everyday tools and this release sounds great!

Myzel394

atuin ai kinda reminds me of https://github.com/Myzel394/zsh-copilot (yes, that's by me :P)

thehours

The PTY proxy looks pretty neat! Excited to give that a try. Losing some of the scrollback was a minor nuisance that I kind of lived with until now.

jauntywundrkind

Release notes have PR #'s but they aren't links. Would be great to linkify, so folks can more easily dive into bits that catch their eye.

fragmede

I had Claude write me fundcli, which goes over your atuin shell history and suggests places to donate to. https://github.com/fragmede/fundcli

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