I prefer all my custom commands as 1 letter. On my most frequently used machine/dev env this means - e for vim m for mise n for pnpm c for Claude x for codex
d for deploy to production
f for friday
Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
111–120 of 252 posts
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#112I think its a fairly good idea - but for myself, i had already mapped csh’s default history character (!) to a comma (,) for the same reason - no shift key to invoke.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#113I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
Looked so backwards to me, too. However, I decided to give it a go, anyway. Now, I have some scripts and small commands which start with a comma, and it looks neat and time saving. Yes, I can do path ordering to override usual commands. However, having a set of odd-job scripts which start with a comma gives a nice namespacing capability alongside a well narrowed-down tab-completion experience. While it's not the neat…
Love Alfred Snippets for this same text expander need.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I use ~/opt/ /bin where ~/opt is a ‘one stop shop’ containing various things, including a symlink to ~/local and directories or symlinks for things that don't play well with others (e.g. cargo, go), and an ~/opt/prefer/bin that goes at the start of PATH containing symlinks to resolve naming conflicts. (Anything that modifies standard behaviour is not in PATH, but instead a shell function present only in in…
What's the difference between opt and local? I thought was for mixin externally provided systems like Homebrew, local is for machine or org-level customizations, and ~ is for user-level customizations.
/opt showed up as a place for packaged software, where each package (directory) has its own bin/, lib/, man/, and so on, to keep it self-contained rather than installing its files in the main hierarchy. ~/opt is just a per-user equivalent, analogous to /usr/local vs ~/.local.
The advantage of /opt is that multi-file software stays together. The disadvantage is that PATHs get long.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#115This is one of those "obvious in hindsight" tricks. The comma prefix gives you a namespace that's guaranteed to never collide with system binaries, shell builtins, or anything from a package manager.
I do something similar with my personal scripts — prefix them with a short namespace. The real win isn't just avoiding collisions though, it's tab completion. Type the prefix and tab, and you immediately see all your custom stuff without wading through hundreds of system commands.
The 2009 date on this is wild. Some of these simple unix conventions age better than most frameworks.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#116I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
curious if you're customizing anyway, why not use eg ripgrep?
Others have already given valid answers: grep is not ripgrep [their params don't match], so it's a bad idea to alias 'grep' to use ripgrep. But it's okay to alias 'ripgrep' (or 'rg' or whatever) to use ripgrep with some args.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#117I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
Looked so backwards to me, too. However, I decided to give it a go, anyway. Now, I have some scripts and small commands which start with a comma, and it looks neat and time saving. Yes, I can do path ordering to override usual commands. However, having a set of odd-job scripts which start with a comma gives a nice namespacing capability alongside a well narrowed-down tab-completion experience. While it's not the neat…
I never knew that what I've known as 'hotstrings' (since the AutoHotKey days) other sometimes also call 'text expanders'.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#118I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
Any severe side effects so far? Have you set PATH up somehow so it is effect only on interactive prompt, and not in the launched processes? Because I cannot imagine much 3rd party scripts working with random flags added to core tools
Not really, since if one usually does that - they probably understand the possible consequences and don't shadow whatever they like, but do it carefully.
On MacOS I shadow that way just curl and git binaries to the versions installed from homebrew and nothing has broken (yet). I know that tar on MacOS is also a weirdo that I'd rather shadow with the homebrew's gtar, but their args are different and I of course understand that there's a high probability of something in system to be bound to mac's version of tar, so here I better remember to use 'sane' tar as gtar or use an alias (instead of shadowing the binary) for tar to use gtar (because aliases are for users, not for system scripts/processes).
And on my home desktop's Debian - I don't even use shadowing of binaries at all (never needed it).
Also, I just realized: I change PATH env via my shell's rc script (~/.zshrc), so I probably could worry even less about shadowing system binaries (like tar on MacOS) possibly breaking things.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#119Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#120Tangentially related. Don't ever put "." in your PATH. I used to do this to avoid typing the "./" to execute something in my current directory. BAD IDEA. It can turn a typo into a fork bomb. I took down a production server trying to save typing two characters.
Elaborate?? "." has been at the end of my PATH for like 20 years.