Copying previous commands with fzf and zsh

Sometimes I want to copy a command I previously typed on my shell to the clipboard. It may be for documentation, note taking, writing a script, setting up an Ansible playbook, sending to someone… You name it.

While I could always search the terminal window for it and select it, I have set-up an alias that make things much easier and less error-prone:

alias hy="
	fc -ln 0 |
	awk '!a[\$0]++' |
	fzf --tac |
	xclip -selection clipboard
"

In action

Typing hy (short for “history yank”) brings fzf with the last commands I typed. I can browse them with the keyboard or use the fuzzy search. Pressing enter will copy the selection to the clipboard.

Better yet, as I have multi-selection enable on fzf, I can select multiple commands using tab. They are copied one per line.

The how

Explaining each part:

• fc -ln 0: On zsh, this returns the entire shell history, one command per line. If you use Bash or other shell, just replace it with the equivalent command.
• awk '!a[\$0]++': The history is piped to awk, which removes the duplicates. Without this cleaning, fzf may display multiple repeated lines, which can be annoying.
• fzf --tac: The result is piped to fzf. The --tac argument reverses the order: we want the last commands to be at the top.
• xclip -selection clipboard: Finally, the commands we selected are copied to the clipboard by xclip.

Needless to say, be sure to have awk, fzf and xclip installed on your system for this to work.