backscroll vs. atuin, asciinema, script, and scrollback

Short version: the existing tools split into two camps — command recorders (shell history, atuin, hishtory) and session recorders (script, asciinema). backscroll sits in the gap between them: it records what each command printed, structured per command, and makes it searchable. That's a different job, and if you already use atuin, the two work fine together (we test that in CI).

	records commands	records outputs	full-text searchable	per-command structure
shell history / atuin / hishtory	✓	✗	✓	✓
script / asciinema	✓	✓	✗ (raw blob)	✗
terminal scrollback / tmux capture-pane	✓	until it isn't	✗	✗
backscroll	✓	✓	✓ (SQLite FTS5)	✓

vs. atuin (and shell history in general)

atuin is an excellent shell history manager: it puts your command lines in SQLite, syncs them, and gives you a great Ctrl+R. But it stores what you typed, never what the command printed. The daily failure mode it can't help with:

A command printed the answer you need — a token, an error message, an IP, a stack trace — and it's gone. Scrollback cleared, tmux pane closed, laptop rebooted. Ctrl+R re-finds the command; nothing re-finds the output.

backscroll records the output too: backscroll show -1 replays the full output (with colors) of any past command; backscroll search "connection refused" finds every command that ever printed that, with exit code, cwd, and timing.

They are not competitors in practice. atuin owns Ctrl+R and cross-machine command sync; backscroll owns "what did that print?". Our CI drives real recorded sessions with atuin's actual shell integration (its Ctrl-R TUI included) under bash, zsh, and fish, and asserts both tools keep working. And if you do want just one tool: backscroll import atuin seeds backscroll's database from your existing atuin history, so you keep your past either way.

vs. script and asciinema

script(1) and asciinema record the whole session as one raw byte stream (or timed cast). Great for replaying a demo; poor for finding anything:

• No boundaries: the recording is one blob per session, not one record per command. "What did terraform apply print last Tuesday" means scrubbing through recordings by hand.
• No metadata: no exit codes, no per-command cwd or duration to filter on.
• No search: escape sequences interleave the text, so even grep over the raw file is unreliable.

backscroll splits the stream at command boundaries (using OSC 133 shell-integration marks), strips ANSI for the search index, keeps the raw bytes for faithful colored replay, and stores exit code, cwd, duration, and host with every command. You can still get a cast when you want one: backscroll export --format asciicast emits a valid asciicast v2 file for any recorded command.

vs. your terminal's scrollback

Scrollback is the tool everyone actually uses for this today, and it's the least reliable: it's RAM, capped, per-pane, and gone on close, clear, reboot, or SSH disconnect. tmux's capture-pane and kitty's show_last_command_output prove the demand for per-command output access — but they only reach what's still in the buffer of that one pane. backscroll is the durable version: every pane, every session, every machine (via encrypted sync), searchable months later.

What backscroll does not do

Honesty section. backscroll is deliberately not:

• a history UI replacement — it binds Ctrl+X Ctrl+P for its fuzzy picker and leaves Ctrl+R alone. Keep atuin/fzf there.
• a cloud service — local-only by design; sync is offline files you move yourself (encrypted, redacted-before-export). Nothing phones home.
• a session replayer for demos — it stores per-command output, not keystroke timing for the whole session. For pretty demo recordings, asciinema is the right tool (we use it for our own demo GIF).
• magic — output is capped per command (defaults: first 256 KiB + last 1 MiB, configurable), full-screen TUI apps (vim, htop) are excluded via alt-screen detection, and secrets matching redaction patterns are maskable or permanently scrubbable.

Trying it takes 30 seconds

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soren-achebe/backscroll/main/install.sh | sh
backscroll run

With fish 4+, nushell, VS Code, kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, or iTerm2 shell integration that's all — zero configuration. See the README for the one-line rc setup elsewhere.