From bash to zsh and everywhere in between, show me yours and I’ll show you mines. Inspire others or get some feedback.
Simply copy & paste the output of alias in your terminal or add some comments to explain things for others.
Edit: Kbin users, click ‘More’ on a comment and use the fediverse link to read responses that have funky formatting
I Alias “sudo !!” with “plz”
I rawdog every single command, I use no aliases at all.
I couldn’t even work if I had aliases in my muscle memory. Imagine ssh’ing to a server and every second command you issue doesn’t exist because it’s some weird alias you set up for yourself.
I’ll stick with the “pure” command and use tab completion.
That’s also part of the reason why I don’t use some of the fancy new tools like ripgrep and exa.
Yeah, I remember when Linux was first becoming cool, in the mid-to-late 90s.
There was a lot of folk wisdom going around, and one of them was “make an alias rm='rm -i' so you don’t accidentally delete anything!”
And then there was the (correct, IMHO) counter-wisdom of “no, that actually makes it more likely to accidentally delete something, because one day you’re going to be on a machine where that alias doesn’t exist, but you’ve become dependent on it existing”.
I don’t mind creating aliases to add colour or change formatting a little bit or something, but don’t make an alias to keep yourself safe, because it’ll probably backfire on you.
You couldn’t even work if you made a few longer commonly used commands convenient aliases? Well alright.
I can’t imagine how you feel about bash scripts lol.
Not the person you responded to, but sure. Breaking muscle memory is extremely grating.
Also, it’s pretty easy to type long commands with little typing. If you use ctrl+r to search backward in your history, you can easily recall long commands - and also, you can use ctrl+x,ctrl+e to edit the current command line in $EDITOR so you can edit long commands. These two tricks make it very easy to type long commands quickly with very little typing.
What… I didn’t know this was a thing.
So I could make be “sudo gimme-dat-new-new” Instead of “sudo DNF upgrade -y”
alias gimmie-dat-new-new='sudo dnf upgrade -y'
Although you should probably look over your upgrade before applying it as a general good practice. But, hey, I do this myself (dnfup instead of gimmie-dat-etc.), so I can’t talk too much shit.
ETA: If you want it to be a persistent alias, though, you gotta add it to your .bashrc
(Bash-Specific)
App-Specific
alias battery='upower -i $(upower -e | grep 'BAT') | grep -E "state|to\ full|percentage"' # Get the battery level of my laptop server when I ssh into it
alias audio="yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3" # Download the audio version of a youtube video
alias wttr="curl wttr.in/Chicago" # Get the weather of my city in the terminal
Terminal Navigation
alias ba2sy="cp ~/.bash_aliases ~/Sync/" # copy my current iteration of my aliases to my shared syncthing folder so that it's accessible across devices
alias sy2ba="cp ~/Sync/.bash_aliases ~/" # replace the current iteration of my aliases w/ the synced version from my syncthing folder
alias mba='micro .bash_aliases' # open my aliases file in the modernized version of 'nano'
alias reload="source ~/.bashrc" # Quickly refresh my system so that the latest alias file is loaded
alias l='exa --group-directories-first -hlras modified --no-user --icons' # exa is a prettier version of ls. Options toggled: Human-readable, long format, reverse output, show hidden files/folders, sort by modified, hide the 'user' column since I'm the only one that uses the computer, and show the icons to make it look fancy```
Replaced Commands
alias cat='batcat --theme=ansi ' # Replace generic output of cat w/ a formatted version. This is bat (batcat in Debian)
alias rm='trash ' # Instead of auto-deleting files, put them in the 'trash' bin for 30 days, then delete.
Server & Docker-related
alias lazy='/home/macallik/.local/bin/lazydocker' # Run Docker
alias pad='ssh MyPad20334' # shorthand to ssh into my server
I wonder if you can be a madlad and symlink your bash-aliases to a synced file.
Some QoL stuff my good friend set-up for me.
# ALIASES -- EXA
alias ls='exa --group-directories-first --color=auto -h -aa -l --git'
# ALIASES -- YAY
alias yy='yay -Y --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'
alias ya='yay -S --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'
alias yu='yay -R --recursive --nosave'
# ALIASES -- CP
alias cp="cp --reflink=auto -i"
And then there’s a bunch of stuff from the output of alias, most of them are git aliases. Those which aren’t git-related are listed below:
-='cd -'
...=../..
....=../../..
.....=../../../..
......=../../../../..
1='cd -1'
2='cd -2'
3='cd -3'
4='cd -4'
5='cd -5'
6='cd -6'
7='cd -7'
8='cd -8'
9='cd -9'
_='sudo '
cp='cp --reflink=auto -i'
egrep='grep -E --color=auto --exclude-dir={.bzr,CVS,.git,.hg,.svn,.idea,.tox}'
fgrep='grep -F --color=auto --exclude-dir={.bzr,CVS,.git,.hg,.svn,.idea,.tox}'
history=omz_history
l='ls -lah'
la='ls -lAh'
ll='ls -lh'
ls='exa --group-directories-first --color=auto -h -aa -l --git'
lsa='ls -lah'
md='mkdir -p'
rd=rmdir
run-help=man
which-command=whence
Ah, yay is an AUR helper, though I personally see it as a pacman helper as well. Link here. Some of the flags and options that can be used for pacman can be used for yay, thus, some of the flags in the aliases I use are actually for pacman. Anyways, on to the breakdown.
alias yy='yay -Y --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'
This one is what I use to look up for packages. The result of runnning yy «search term» would be a list of packages matching the search term and prompting the user on which package(s) to install.
| flag | description |
|---|---|
-Y |
performs yay-specific operations. |
--needed |
(pacman) do not reinstall up to date packages |
--norebuild |
skips package build if in cache and up to date |
--nocleanafter |
do not remove package sources after successful build |
--noredownlod |
skip pkgbuild download if in cache and up to date |
--nodiffmenu |
don’t show diffs for build files |
--nocleanmenu |
don’t clean build PKGBUILDS |
--removemake |
remove makedepends after install |
--sudoloop |
loop sudo calls in the background to avoid timeout |
alias ya='yay -S --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'
This one is what I use for installing packages. Useful if I already know what package I would be installing.
| flag | description |
|---|---|
-S |
(pacman, extended by Yay to cover AUR as well) Synchronize packages. Packages are installed directly from the remote repositories, including all dependencies required to run the packages. |
alias yu='yay -R --recursive --nosave'
This one is what I use when uninstalling packages. I usually check the package name with something like yay -Qi «package-name-guess» beforehand.
| flag | description |
|---|---|
-R |
(pacman, extended by Yay to also remove cached data about devel packages) Remove package(s) from the system. |
--recursive |
(pacman) Remove each target specified including all of their dependencies, provided that (A) they are not required by other packages; and (B) they were not explicitly installed by the user. This operation is recurisve and analogous to a backwards --sync operation. |
--nosave |
(pacman) Instructs pacman to ignore file backup designations. (This avoids the removed files being renamed with a .pacsave extension.) |
I actually don’t know much about both yay and pacman myself, since the aliases were just passed onto me by the same friend who helped me (re-)install my system (long story) and set-up the aliases. Having looked all these up, however, I might make a few changes (like changing the --nocleanafter and --nocleanmenu options to their clean ones`).
I like the idea of binding numbers to parent directory traversal. I do cd …/… a lot in one of my projects (switching between source code and terraform folder), it’d be handy to get out of the terraform folder by just typing 2.
