Changelog Interviews Bringing Atuin to the desktop
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Oct 22, 2025 Ellie Huxtable, the innovative open-source maintainer, shares her journey from London to San Francisco while discussing her creation, Atuin. This magical tool syncs shell history but now evolves into Atuin Desktop, a runbook editor designed for team collaboration. Ellie dives into the use cases of runbooks, detailing how executable blocks streamline workflows. She also explains the tech behind it, including Tauri and Rust, and addresses the challenges of building a desktop app versus a CLI. Expect insights on open-source strategies and the future of Atuin!
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From Command History To Executable Runbooks
- Atuin CLI records every shell command, making recall simple but not ideal for multi-step workflows.
- The desktop app addresses that by letting you document, annotate, and execute full runbooks with embedded terminals.
Turn Terminal Experiments Into Shared Docs
- Pull shell history into runbook blocks to turn ephemeral terminal experiments into reusable documentation.
- Capture commands and outputs so teammates can reproduce and execute workflows reliably.
Built With Tauri And Rust
- Ellie built the desktop as a Tauri app with Rust backends to avoid Electron's weight and leverage system webviews.
- She extended BlockNote and wrote execution code in Rust to support a future embedded runtime.