Formatting history command using \t instead of space as separator

Is it possible to format history command output using tab separator instead of space between fields?

I know the variable $HISTTIMEFORMAT is there another variable to format the output?

For example:

command_number{\t}date_time{\t}command{\n}

It doesn't have to be a specific shell.

Without knowing your exact purpose, here is a way to remove leading whitespaces, and also replace the default "double space" (separating the columns with ID and Command) with a \t instead:

history | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/ \+ /\t/'

The sed expression is 2-part:

• s/^[ \t]*//: This part removes any leading spaces or tabs (if you for some reason want to start each line with a \t, do this instead: s/^[ \t]*/\t/).
• s/ \+ /\t/: This part replaces 2 or more spaces with a \t.

The order is important, since you want to first remove any leading whitespaces, and afterwards replace any 2 or more spaces with \t. If you just run the 2nd part, you also risk getting \t at the beginning of lines with smaller ID numbers.

With this, you hopefully have some building blocks to continue customizing your command. If you also want to add timestamp to the history, it gets a little more complicated, since there are additional single spaces separating the columns.

A little inspiration came from this post.