Know your HISTFILE

Today I learned that psql has a cool feature called the HISTFILE. It's a record of your commands in the REPL, named ~/.psql_history by default.

Building off Josh's post yesterday about ~/.psqlrc settings, add this there to get a unique log for each database:

\set HISTFILE ~/.psql_history-:DBNAME

Here's the tail of my TIL log:

$ tail ~./psql_history-hr-til_development
select * from developers limit 1;
select * from developers limit 2;
select * from developers limit 3;

This is just a text file; it can be edited. You could add a complex command, or meaningful reminder to yourself, and it will be available in psql when you traverse your history (↑ or CTRL-P).