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

Atuin v18.13 introduces major updates including an AI-powered shell helper, a faster daemon-based search index, and a new PTY proxy for seamless UI rendering.

A new release is out! v18.13 is probably the biggest set of changes we have released in a good while, read on to find out more.

Much faster and better search with the `daemon`

The daemon has existed for a long time, and has been marked as "experimental" for its entire existence. It was originally shipped as a workaround for poor ZFS/SQLite interactions, or for systems with particularly high IO latency.

The daemon now maintains a hot, in-memory search index. This is powered by a modified version of nucleo. Nucleo implements the same algorithm as fzf, bringing better performance and accuracy.

We've also added configurable multipliers for frequency, recency, and frecency scoring.

Enable this by running atuin setup, or by adding the following to your config file:

search_mode = "daemon-fuzzy"
[daemon]
enabled = true
autostart = true

With autostart = true, Atuin will manage the daemon lifecycle for you. It will ensure it's up to date, healthy, and running when required. If you'd rather manage that yourself, you can leave autostart setting disabled.

The daemon also allows you to sync records without interacting with the shell - remote machines stay up to date, and have the latest data from the second you log in.

Atuin AI

With this release, we are introducing atuin ai. Atuin AI provides an effective english-to-bash helper within your shell. Press ? on an empty prompt, describe what you want, then press enter to execute or tab to edit. If you wish to adjust the suggested command, or ask questions about it, you can press f to follow up.

This is another opt-in feature, either by running atuin setup, or by setting this in your config:

[ai]
enabled = true

We're building this out with accuracy, safety, and data privacy in mind.

Accuracy

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.

Safety

If the generated command is suspected to be dangerous (wiping data, restarting deployments, etc), then Atuin will flag it as dangerous and require you to press enter twice in order to execute it.

This is achieved by a mix of static checks and LLM-powered guardrails. We're also working to integrate it with a command dataset.

Data privacy

By default, Atuin AI knows nothing about your machine, other than the operating system and shell. This is the bare minimum required to generate a decent shell command.

It will soon be able to ask you for access to more data - such as the current directory path, contents, git status, etc - but you must give permission first. This will happen in a similar way to existing agents, and be configurable to an even finer degree in your config file.

Extra powers with a pty proxy

If you've used Atuin before, you've probably noticed a tradeoff with our rendering. Either fullscreen alt-screen mode that takes over your terminal, or inline mode that clears your previous output. Neither is great.

With 18.13, we are shipping atuin hex. With Hex, we can have our cake AND eat it too. The Atuin popup renders over the top of your previous output, but when it's closed we can restore the output successfully.

Hex is a super lightweight pty proxy. It behaves like a very minimal tmux, and enables us to integrate with the terminal in ways that we cannot do with shell hooks alone. How it works warrants an entirely separate post!

hex does not affect scrollback, does not break terminal features, and literally just proxies bytes and maintains a shadow vt100. It is designed to be as minimally intrusive and minimally resource intensive as possible. You can enable hex one-off by running atuin hex, or make it permanent by putting the following in your shell config:

eval "$(atuin hex init)"

Future

Hex doesn't just stop here. In future releases, we can use it for

Support searching and syncing command outputs, in addition to the commands
Supporting shells that do not allow for shell hooks
Supporting anything readline-esque

If using Hex breaks your setup, it is a bug. Please report it.

New authentication

We're rolling out new authentication for our hosted sync service, running as part of Atuin Hub. You can now log in with Google or GitHub, and recover your account via email. Your existing sync service credentials will continue to work. We couldn't support this before without building a bunch of infrastructure into the intentionally minimal atuin-server binary.

The Hub isn't open source yet. We plan to open it up once the codebase stabilises (it's also got a bunch of runbooks stuff mixed in), but it's changing too fast right now for that to be useful to anyone. We'll share more when we're closer!

If you self-host, nothing changes. Your server works exactly as it did before, and atuin-server is well supported.