Selectively remove command history of Windows Terminal

The command history in Windows Terminal is managed by whatever shell application you are using in it.

You don't mention which shell you are using, but here are a few possibilities:

• If you are using WSL with the bash shell, then history -c clears the history for the current shell instance. Deleting the file ~/.bash_history will clear the save history from previous sessions. You can selectively remove an entry from the current session using history -d <offset> (use history by itself to see the offset).

• If you are using WSL with the fish shell, then history clear both clears the current shell history and deletes past history. history delete ... can be used to remove specific entries. See man history under fish for more info.

• If you are using WSL with zsh, it seems to be a little more complicated -- I'll just provide a link to a separate answer on that.

• If you are using PowerShell, then Clear-History may clear it for a particular session. But if you are using the psreadline module (which is a default on most recent PowerShell versions, you may need to press Alt+F7 instead. To clear the permanent history file, you'll need to find it with Get-PSReadlineOption | select -expand historysavepath and then delete that file.

• If you are using the CMD shell (the "old" Windows/DOS compatible shell), then Alt+F7 will clear the whole history. CMD does not permanently store a history file, so there's probably no need to delete one item.

  However, if you would like to clean up individual entries anyway, you can open the history popup with F7, select an item using Up/Down, and press Delete to remove it.

Note that this all refers to the command history. There is also the concept of the scrollback buffer in Windows Terminal. In PowerShell and most WSL/Linux shells, the clear command will clear that.

Here is the location of the text file that contains the history for the Windows Terminal.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\PSReadLine\ConsoleHost_history.txt

In Windows terminal (Windows 10) with Powershell version 7.* this worked for me:

Set-PSReadLineOption -HistorySaveStyle SaveNothing

I ended up adding three functions to the profile file ($profile.AllUsersCurrentHost)

Functions:

function History-file {
  Write-Output (Get-PSReadLineOption).HistorySavePath
}

function History-Stop {
  Set-PSReadLineOption -HistorySaveStyle SaveNothing
}


function History-Save {
  Set-PSReadLineOption -HistorySaveStyle SaveIncrementally
}