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Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

blog.balthazar-rouberol.com

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Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#41

Post by kubanczyk »

mceachen wrote: post #33
Spivak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A somewhat less fancy version of this is $CDPATH. export CDPATH="/path/to/my/projects:$HOME/Work/Projects" # From anywhere. cd andr

Note that CDPATH can break shell scripts that assume `cd` hasn't been adulterated. A huge block of "unalias" calls at the beginning of shell scripts used to be a common practice, but they don't seem to be found in more widely-used tools these days.

Except with CDPATH the `cd` is usually not an alias. Even `/usr/bin/cd` is aware of CDPATH.

It's a bug in the script, just like reacting badly to $IFS or $LANG.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#42

Post by asicsp »

I rarely use Ctrl+r to get command from history, because most of the time I know the starting characters of the command I need. So, I type those characters and use arrows keys to match from history. This is enabled via these settings in .inputrc

    # use up and down arrow to match search history based on typed starting text
    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    "\e[B": history-search-forward
I also changed couple of setting wrt Tab autocompletion:

    # when using Tab for completion, ignore case
    set completion-ignore-case on
    # single Tab press will complete if unique, display multiple completions otherwise
    set show-all-if-ambiguous on

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#43

Post by ASTP001 »

mstudio wrote: post #35

fishshell is my favorite productivity enhancer for the terminal: https://fishshell.com/ The primary reason I chose over zsh/bash was that autocompletion just works. If you install it, I highly recommend oh-my-fish as well, which allows you to add packages for look/functionality: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish If you're a zsh user, they have a similar framework: oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

I really enjoyed using fish for a short while, but soon I learned that it was not POSIX compliant. This was a deal breaker for me since my colleagues would often share scripts that wouldn't just work for me. I use zsh nowadays.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#44

Post by JNRowe »

Spivak wrote: post #29
alufers wrote: post #27

The single best shell productivity tip for me was to use z: https://github.com/rupa/z It automatically makes a list of directories you frequently use in your shell and if you type `z a-small-substring-of-the-directory-path` it does a cd to that directory. (e.g. I type `z and` and it changes my current directory to $HOME/Work/Projects/android`). Saved me tons of typing.

A somewhat less fancy version of this is $CDPATH. export CDPATH="/path/to/my/projects:$HOME/Work/Projects" # From anywhere. cd andr

CDPATH doesn't require the export as it is local to the shell session. Simply setting it will work as you'd want and won't pollute the environment for subshells and scripts.

And zsh users get another advantage here. You can use assign to the cdpath array or the CDPATH colon-delimited string, they are both treated the same internally. The advantage is being able to `cdpath+=...`, much like adding to $PATH with `path+=` or removing from PATH with `path^=`. Check zshbuiltins(1) for how to make your variables work like this, or how to use typeset -U to remove duplicates automatically, or $thousand_other_cool_things.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#45

Post by JNRowe »

ASTP001 wrote: post #43
mstudio wrote: post #35

fishshell is my favorite productivity enhancer for the terminal: https://fishshell.com/ The primary reason I chose over zsh/bash was that autocompletion just works. If you install it, I highly recommend oh-my-fish as well, which allows you to add packages for look/functionality: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish If you're a zsh user, they have a similar framework: oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

I really enjoyed using fish for a short while, but soon I learned that it was not POSIX compliant. This was a deal breaker for me since my colleagues would often share scripts that wouldn't just work for me. I use zsh nowadays.

I love zsh, but it isn't without its own strange quirks that make compatibility exciting at times. In a thread from a fortnight ago¹, RANDOM is handled very differently for example. Try `echo $(echo $RANDOM) $(echo $RANDOM)` in zsh and bash.

I'm unsure whether minor differences that catch you out occasionally are worse than huge differences that you always have to think about. For me zsh still wins ;)

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22841259

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#46

Post by linsomniac »

mstudio wrote: post #35

fishshell is my favorite productivity enhancer for the terminal: https://fishshell.com/ The primary reason I chose over zsh/bash was that autocompletion just works. If you install it, I highly recommend oh-my-fish as well, which allows you to add packages for look/functionality: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish If you're a zsh user, they have a similar framework: oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

I tried fish for a while and loved the history recommendation mechanism, but the 'vi mode' emulation had enough annoyances that I went back to zsh. From the bugs filed on it, it seems like the vi fixes weren't really possible.

I did install a similar history recommender in zsh and have been pretty happy with that.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#48

Post by stygiansonic »

mstudio wrote: post #35

fishshell is my favorite productivity enhancer for the terminal: https://fishshell.com/ The primary reason I chose over zsh/bash was that autocompletion just works. If you install it, I highly recommend oh-my-fish as well, which allows you to add packages for look/functionality: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish If you're a zsh user, they have a similar framework: oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

Another vote for fish. I would say another benefit is that it has a reasonably great out of the box experience with little customization needed to get a lot of its benefits, eg awesome autocomplete.

The downsides have been mentioned, namely the lack of compatibility with shell scripts not written for it. In the same vein, until somewhat recently, operators like && did not work for it.

It’s still my daily shell, and I really only use something like bash when having to remote into a production server.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#49

Post by kreetx »

celeritascelery wrote: post #25

No matter how many times I read articles like this I always manage to learn something new. For example this time I learned about brace expansion. Will save me retyping a bunch of commands with different text.

Same here. I though I'd seen most of them by now but apparently not :)

echo ${MY_VAR:-some_default} is another class of useful functionality.

Re: Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

#50

Post by codegladiator »

asicsp wrote: post #42

I rarely use Ctrl+r to get command from history, because most of the time I know the starting characters of the command I need. So, I type those characters and use arrows keys to match from history. This is enabled via these settings in .inputrc # use up and down arrow to match search history based on typed starting text "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward I also changed couple of setting w…

You can use ctrl+r for commands which are similar (say ssh to n number of servers, so the up/down would still take some amount of browsing the options)

Just tag commands with a # at the end

> $ complex command here # tagHere

Later use the tag with ctrl+r

I do this all the time

> ssh 127.0.0.1 # master

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