Ignore specific commands from being written to zsh history

Some commands are best kept out of your shell history.

This can be for privacy or usability reasons.

In my case, I very often jump between neovim and the shell instance with ctrl-z and fg. Once in the shell, I will run whatever commands I need, and then jump back into neovim with fg to continue working.

It happens often, that after sending the neovim process to the background with ctrl-z, and hitting UP,UP on my keyboard to select the second last command (as the very last was fg), I move to fast and select fg instead. As a nerd, this is way too annoying.

As fg is basically as fast as hiting UP,UP, I can do without having the fg entry in my shell history at all. This will enable me to always hit UP once to select the last command, enabling a workflow as such: work in neovim -> ctrl-z -> go run main.go -> fg -> (repeat).

Solution

This solution is for zsh, but I read it works for bash as well. The option setting may be different though.

It requires only two things:

1. set setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE in your .zshrc
2. set an alias for fg (or whichever command you’re not wanting to have written to history)

The alias will be the exact same command, but just with a white space preceding it:

alias fg =" fg"

Now, when you execute your command, it will be substituted by your shell with the set alias, and because the actual command that’s executed (the alias) has a whitespace preceding it, it will not be written to your zshhistory.