iz

iz records shell commands together with their full terminal output, and makes all of it searchable from a single SQLite database.

If you have ever re-run a five minute scan just to look at one line of its output again, that is the problem iz solves. Commands run through iz behave normally: colors, progress bars and interactivity all work as usual. The difference is that afterwards the command line, exit code, duration, working directory and the complete colored output are stored and indexed.

Why not atuin or asciinema?

• atuin stores your shell history with great search, but it only keeps the command line. What the command printed is gone the moment you close the terminal.
• asciinema records the whole session, but there is no way to search for "that nmap run where port 443 was filtered" or "the last build that mentioned this warning". You scrub through video.

iz sits between the two: per-command recording like atuin, output capture like asciinema, and full-text search over both.

How it works

• Capture: iz -- <cmd> runs the command inside a PTY. Output is mirrored to your terminal while being recorded. The program still sees a tty, so colors and progress bars stay on.
• Storage: one SQLite file per machine. Run metadata (command, exit code, duration, hostname, cwd), the raw output gzipped (typically 10-20x smaller), and an FTS5 index over the plain text.
• Cleanup: clear-screen sequences are dropped and progress-bar redraws collapse to their final frame, so replayed output looks like what you actually saw.
• Search: the TUI lists one colored line per run — id, date, tool, directory, command — and re-runs the full-text query live as you type (change:reload + --phony, so fzf itself never re-filters and every keystroke hits the FTS index). Lowercase terms match case-insensitively; mixed-case terms (like ESC8) match verbatim. host:, dir: and size: filter on columns; exit status and size are shown in the preview, whose header carries the hostname. The preview highlights whatever you type.

Install

go install github.com/0xf61/iz@latest

The binary lands in $GOBIN (default ~/go/bin/iz); make sure it is on your $PATH. Requires Go 1.24+. No cgo, so the same works on Linux.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/0xf61/iz && cd iz
go build -o ~/.local/bin/iz .
echo 'iz f | source' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Cross-compiling for another machine (a server, a VM, a container) is a single command since there is no cgo:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o dist/iz-linux-amd64 .

Usage

iz -- cargo build --release       # run + record any command
iz a cargo make pytest            # record these tools automatically via wrappers
iz f | source                     # generate fish wrappers + ctrl-g search widget
iz                                # search TUI
iz sh 42                          # replay output #42, colors intact
iz e 42                           # open output #42 in $EDITOR
iz i cargo build.log              # import a log file
iz m laptop.db                    # merge a db from another machine
iz r                              # delete runs (fzf multi-select)
iz d less                         # remove a wrapper

Search examples:

iz "warning: unused" cmd:cargo    # cargo runs mentioning a warning
iz timeout host:build01           # runs on a specific machine
iz size:>1mb                      # only large outputs (kb/mb/gb, > < >= <=)
iz 'deprecated'                   # exact phrase via FTS

TUI keys

key	action
enter	view output with less -R (colors kept, query highlighted)
tab	toggle selection / insert command into the prompt (widget)
ctrl-a	select all
ctrl-e	open output in $EDITOR
ctrl-y	delete selected runs and reload
'term	fzf exact match (e.g. 'tool:make)

Pausing recording

Recording is gated on the $IZ environment variable, which defaults to ~/.iz/iz.db:

set -e IZ                 # stop recording in this session (wrappers pass through)
set -gx IZ ~/.iz/iz.db    # resume

Multiple machines

Each host writes to its own database and stamps every run with its hostname. Copy one over and merge, then query by machine:

scp build01:~/.iz/iz.db b01.db
iz m b01.db
iz host:build01 failed

Development

make test      # go test ./...
make build     # go build -o iz .
make linux     # static linux/amd64 + linux/arm64 into dist/

file	role
main.go	CLI dispatch
db.go	schema, CRUD, query parsing
record.go	PTY capture, shell quoting
text.go	ANSI cleanup, gzip
search.go	fzf TUI
cmds.go	add/del/list/rm/import/merge/show/edit
fish.go	fish integration generator