[Bug]: Ctrl+R -> Tab -> Ctrl+R -> Esc causes Atuin to freeze indefinitely if the daemon is enabled but not running

[taylordotfish]

What did you expect to happen?

I expected Atuin to display history, edit the most recent command, display search results for that command, and then exit back to the shell.

What happened?

Atuin behaves as expected until Esc is pressed. Then, the terminal is blank except for the cursor and does not respond to any keypresses, even Ctrl+C.

I'm able to reproduce the issue consistently as follows:

1. In terminal A, start sh or otherwise temporarily disable Atuin in that terminal only, to avoid automatically restarting the daemon.
2. In terminal A, kill the Atuin daemon, e.g., with pkill -x atuin.
3. In terminal B, press Ctrl+R, then Tab, then Ctrl+R, then Esc.

I also experienced this issue immediately after installing Atuin, without ever killing the daemon, so it seems like the relevant factor is more whether the daemon is running rather than whether it has been killed per se.

Here's a screen recording of the issue:

atuinbug.mp4

Atuin doctor output

{
  "atuin": {
    "version": "18.16.1",
    "commit": "671f96b60dac49d1d2de73cc0812986a5e22ce7b",
    "sync": {
      "auth_state": "Hub (authenticated)",
      "records": true,
      "auto_sync": true,
      "last_sync": "2026-05-25 9:09:43.888177193 +00:00:00"
    },
    "sqlite_version": "3.46.0"
  },
  "shell": {
    "name": "bash",
    "default": "bash",
    "plugins": [
      "atuin",
      "bash-preexec"
    ],
    "preexec": "bash-preexec"
  },
  "system": {
    "os": "Debian GNU/Linux",
    "arch": "x86_64",
    "version": "13",
    "disks": [
      {
        "name": "(redacted)",
        "filesystem": "ext4"
      },
      {
        "name": "(redacted)",
        "filesystem": "ext4"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[BinaryMuse]

Ref: #3384