I wanted to like atuin. The idea is great. But it just could not match the instant search that ctrl-r with fzf offers sadly. There is always a noticeable delay that annoyed me and made me revert back to fzf for search.
For me another issue was that I needed to do more keystrokes for the same behaviour (search a previously ran command and execute it).
Fuzzy shell history search is just one of those mind-blowing things. I love my history, it's such a trove and I can trust it to work as some kind of external memory (it's enough to vaguely know the kubectl command, or that I want to "du -h | sort" to see what is using disk space, etc).
I also had a rather noticeable delay when launching atuin. As it turns out, this was because it checked for an update every time it launched! You can disable that update check: add a ` update_check = false` to your `~/.config/atuin/config.toml` [1]. That made the delay pretty much disappear for me.
We actually fixed the delay issue, but since you disabled update checking you wouldn't have known to update!
It was quite annoying so we're sorry for that