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Aliases & Functions

As you can imagine it can become tiresome typing long commands that involve many flags or verbose options. Nevertheless, most shells support aliasing. For instance, an alias in bash has the following structure (note there is no space around the = sign):

alias alias_name="command_to_alias"

Alias have many convenient features

# Alias can summarize good default flags
alias ll="ls -lh"

# Save a lot of typing for common commands
alias gc="git commit"

# Alias can overwrite existing commands
alias mv="mv -i"
alias mkdir="mkdir -p"

# Alias can be composed
alias la="ls -A"
alias lla="la -l"

# To ignore an alias run it prepended with \
\ls
# Or can be disabled using unalias
unalias la

However in many scenarios aliases can be limiting, specially when you are trying to write chain commands together that take the same arguments. An alternative exists which is functions which are a midpoint between aliases and custom shell scripts.

Here is an example function that makes a directory and move into it.

mcd () {
    mkdir -p $1
    cd $1
}

Alias and functions will not persist shell sessions by default. To make an alias persistent you need to include it a one the shell startup script files like .bashrc or .zshrc. My suggestion is to write them separately in a .alias and source that file from your different shell config files.

Shells & Frameworks

During shell and scripting we covered the bash shell since it is by far the most ubiquitous shell and most systems have it as the default option. Nevertheless, it is not the only option.

For example the zsh shell is a superset of bash and provides many convenient features out of the box such as:

Moreover many shells can be improved with frameworks, some popular general frameworks like prezto or oh-my-zsh, and smaller ones that focus on specific features like for example zsh-syntax-highlighting or zsh-history-substring-search. Other shells like fish include a lot of these user-friendly features by default. Some of these features include:

One thing to note when using these frameworks is that if the code they run is not properly optimized or it is too much code, your shell can start slowing down. You can always profile it and disable the features that you do not use often or value over speed.

Terminal Emulators & Multiplexers

Along with customizing your shell it is worth spending some time figuring out your choice of terminal emulator and its settings. There are many many terminal emulators out there (here is a comparison).

Since you might be spending hundreds to thousands of hours in your terminal it pays off to look into its settings. Some of the aspects that you may want to modify in your terminal include:

It is also worth mentioning terminal multiplexers like tmux. tmux allows you to pane and tab multiple shell sessions. It also supports attaching and detaching which is a very common use-case when you are working on a remote server and want to keep you shell running without having to worry about disowning you current processes (by default when you log out your processes are terminated). This way, with tmux you can jump into and out of complex terminal layouts. Similar to terminal emulators tmux supports heavy customization by editing the ~/.tmux.conf file.

Command-line utilities

The command line utilities that most UNIX based operating systems have by default are more than enough to do 99% of the stuff you usually need to do.

In the next few subsections I will cover alternative tools for extremely common shell operations which are more convenient to use. Some of these tools add new improved functionality to the command whereas others just focus on providing a simpler, more intuitive interface with better defaults.

fasd vs cd

Even with improved path expansion and tab autocomplete, changing directories can become quite repetitive. Fasd (or autojump) solves this issue by keeping track of recent and frequent folders you have been to and performing fuzzy matching.

Thus if I have visited the path /home/user/awesome_project/code running z code will cd to it. If I have multiple folders called code I can disambiguate by running z awe code which will be closer match. Unlike autojump, fasd also provides commands that instead of performing cd just expand frequent and /or recent files,folders or both.

bat vs cat

Even though cat does it job perfectly, bat improves it by providing syntax highlighting, paging, line numbers and git integration.

exa/ranger vs ls

ls is a great command but some of the defaults can be annoying such as displaying the size in raw bytes. exa provides better defaults

If you are in need of navigating many folders and/or previewing many files, ranger can be much more efficient than cd and cat due to its wonderful interface. It is quite customizable and with a correct setup you can even preview images in your terminal

fd vs find

fd is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find. find defaults like having to use the --name flag (which is what you want to do 99% of the time) make it easier to use in an every day basis. It is also git aware and will skip files in your .gitignore and .git folder by default. It also has nice color coding by default.

rg/fzf vs grep

grep is a great tool but if you want to grep through many files at once, there are better tools for that purpose. ack, ag & rg recursively search your current directory for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore rules. They all work pretty similar but I favor rg due to how fast it can search my entire home directory.

Similarly, it can be easy to find yourself doing CMD | grep PATTERN over an over again. fzf is a command line fuzzy finder that enables you to interactively filter the output of pretty much any command.

rsync vs cp/scp

Whereas mv and scp are perfect for most scenarios, when copying/moving around large amounts of files, large files or when some of the data is already on the destination rsync is a huge improvement. rsync will skip files that have already been transferred and with the --partial flag it can resume from a previously interrupted copy.

trash vs rm

rm is a dangerous command in the sense that once you delete a file there is no turning back. However, modern OS do not behave like that when you delete something in the file explorer, they just move it to the Trash folder which is cleared periodically.

Since how the trash is managed varies from OS to OS there is not a single CLI utility. In macOS there is trash and in linux there is trash-cli among others.

mosh vs ssh

ssh is a very handy tool but if you have a slow connection, the lag can become annoying and if the connection interrupts you have to reconnect. mosh is a handy tool that works allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo.

tldr vs man

You can figure out what a commands does and what options it has using man and the -h/’–help’ flag most of the time. However, in some cases it can be a bit daunting navigating these if they are detailed

The tldr command is a community driven documentation system that’s available from the command line and gives a few simple illustrative examples of what the command does and the most common argument options.

aunpack vs tar/unzip/unrar

As this xkcd references, it can be quite tricky to remember the options for tar and sometimes you need a different tool altogether such as unrar for .rar files. The atool package provides the aunpack command which will figure out the correct options and always put the extracted archives in a new folder.

Exercises

  1. Run cat .bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10 (or cat .zhistory | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10 for zsh) to get top 10 most used commands and consider writing shorter aliases for them
  2. Choose a terminal emulator and figure out how to change the following properties:
    • Font choice
    • Color scheme. How many colors does a standard scheme have? why?
    • Scrollback history size
  3. Install fasd or some similar software and write a bash/zsh function called v that performs fuzzy matching on the passed arguments and opens up the top result in your editor of choice. Then, modify it so that if there are multiple matches you can select them with fzf.
  4. Since fzf is quite convenient for performing fuzzy searches and the shell history is quite prone to those kind of searches, investigate how to bind fzf to ^R. You can find some info here
  5. What does the --bar option do in ack?

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