Ewen Quimerc'h

Efficient CLI aliases

How to set up a centralized system to store and use your aliases everywhere

Efficient CLI aliases

Setting aliases for commands is a very good way to save time at work. But setting them up always takes time -far more than it should! Moreover, you lose them all if you have to ssh on a server or change device. Time to change this by building a very easy setup!

You will see how to

1. Use a remote repository

The main goal is to make your aliases available on every device you’re connecting, so using a centralized system is recommended in this situation.

Storing aliases

We won’t save our aliases in the classic .bashrc (or .zshrc.) It’s better to store them in a .aliases file and add source .aliases to the .bashrc/.zshrc.

So for example type this:

cd ~
nano .aliases

and

# Usual Shell command (cd, ls...)
alias dirs="ls -al | grep '^d'"
alias l="ls -al"
alias lf="ls -aFG"
alias lm="ls -al|more"
alias lt='ls --human-readable --size -1 -S --classify'
alias h="history"

Storing aliases online

As we are using a single file to store them, you can use Github Gists. You can download my template with useful aliases here or create your own and clone it to your computer.

I suggest you to fork my file (copy it and add it to your personal gists), so you can create you own aliases without depending on mine, and still begin the setup easily.

It will behave like a git repository, excepted it’s for a single file.

Download them to a new device

Now that you have you aliases stored online, learn how to use them on your devices ! Every time you create a new VM, set up a new raspberry pi or connect to a new server, just run this (don’t forget to replace with your gist id and username if you forked my gist or used your personal file!):

mkdir ~/.tools && cd $_
git clone https://gist.github.com/EwenQuim/b3ba203bdacb17bc1a15815cbc58792d.git .
source .aliases
echo "source ~/.tools/.aliases" >> ~/.bashrc

Change .bashrc to .zshrc if you use zsh, of course.

Now we can download our aliases to every device, yay!

But there are some issues : we can’t update (upload) easily the list of aliases ! And it’s not very handy… Do you like typing nano ~/.tools/.aliases and then source ~/.bashrc every time you just want to change a simple alias ?

The system is not fully efficient here, so we’ll se how to improve it in part 3. But before that, look at this weird trick in part 2 to boost your productivity.

2. Tip: Start your aliases with a comma

‘Why this monstrosity ? I’ve never seen a command beginning with a comma !’

Absolutely, and that’s why we will do this. It allows two things:

As explained in this old but useful article, this little known trick allows to display every custom command/alias by typing the comma then typing tab. It looks like this:

-

Also, the comma is easy to type : it’s a lowercase character, does not require weird combination of keys, exists on all keyboards…

Trust me, that’s not that odd to do so ;)

3. One alias to rule them all

Want to see, edit, and synchronise your aliases in only one command?

See, change, update your aliases

If you have forked my gist in 1 :

Just type ,aliases. It displays the list of commands, allows you to change them and synchronize everything. Easy, isn’t it?

What’s inside

The command ,aliases looks like this (already included in my gist in case you download/fork it).

alias ,aliases="cd ~.tools/ && git pull && nano .aliases && source .aliases && git commit -a -v ; git push origin master ; cd -"

When you type ,aliases, this happens:

This takes seconds, and is very handy to use.

Thank you!

Don’t hesitate to remove the -S option in the commit alias if you don’t PGP sign your commits (I’ll explain later why you should -and it’s easy too!)

I hope it will be useful for you !