aliases in .bashrc

Obvious things I don’t see mentioned:

• Bash scripts kept in the home directory or another place that’s logical for them specifically.
• history | grep whatever (or other useful piping), though your older commands are forgotten eventually. You can mess with the values of HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE environment variables in your system.

If you use fish you can use abbreviations

I wouldn’t install a program for this. You will end up relying on it when there are already some built in tools that can accomplish these things.

1. Bash scripts placed in ~/bin or ~/.local/bin

• Can have simple or complex scripts setup to do whatever you want
• Easily called from terminal or automated through cron or systemd

2. Environment variables set in -/.bashrc

• Great for storing common paths, strings, etc.
• Can be easily incorporated into bash scripts

3. Aliases set in ~/.bashrc

• Ideal (IMO) for common commands with preferred options
• for example you could setup your most used rsync command to an alias: alias rsync-cust=“rsync -avuP”

I did not know any of the programs mentioned in the post, but some of them seem really nice. Can someone who thinks aliases are a better solution please explain why they think so and what is their advantage over these projects? Do they have any pitfalls that you are aware of?

I believe that if I use a command sparsely enough, I will forget the created alias name just a few days later than the actual command.

Fish shell. Out of the box it autocompletes taking into account in which directory you are. It’s like bash Ctrl+r but without actually invoking it before. Really ergonomic.

I have a file in my ~ called .alias and it is sourced by any shell I might use (currently just zsh) in it are common aliases like s => sudo and “sudo” => "sudo " (just put this as an alias if you use them a lot, you’ll thank me when you’re trying to use them with sudo)

I like bash scripts + auto key! Custom commands with custom keybinds.

An alias file is what I’ve found to be the simplest. Just have to add one line to either .zshrc or .bashrc that links to the file. I store the alias file and some custom scripts that a few aliases call in a git repo so it’s literally just a matter of git pull, add one line to the rc file and then close and reopen the terminal and everything is ready to go.

Fish (or zsh with some addons) will give you tab completion based on previous commands, might be something of interest?

Here’s some addon tips if you’d rather run zsh instead of fish:

https://gist.github.com/abhigenie92/a907cdf8a474aa6b569ebe89aeee560d

McFly for better ”ctrl+c”. It also keeps track of what commands you ran in what directory.

https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

Fish and its search functionality work great for me.

I use vi as the command line editor, so fetching history commands is quick:

ESC /searchstring

But if it’s something really frequent or may benefit from parameters, I usually throw a perl or bash script in /usr/local/bin.

.zsh aliases to bash functions.

Thanks for the list though, gonna take a look at a few!

I’d say aliases and functions are your friends here.