One of the principles of efficiency when programming is to avoid unnecessary repetition (DRY), be it in code, or in physical and mental tasks. My goal is to write at least one tweak per day to my environment, whether a macro in my editor (Emacs), or a shell script or alias in my console environment, which is Z shell. (Note that this applies to other shells also.)
Reading Matthew Might’s article on console hacks inspired me to use that to quickly and easily find candidates for aliases and functions in Z shell.
The following command sorts the history by frequency of use:
% history -1000000 | cut -c8- | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -15
The output from my recent work with DoctorJ is:
11 cd ~ijdkproj
12 gitpullall
12 myprod.rb
12 rake
13 ..
14 gitdfs
15 c
15 la
20 sd
24 scrub
27 git status
28 git push -u origin master
37 git diff
39 ls
51 gct
52 gitdelta.rb
(If you’re wondering what the “..” command is, that’s an alias for “cd ..”.)
In the frequency list the salient command in terms of length is “git push -u origin master”, executed 28 times. So we can consider an alias for it, such as “gpom”, and see whether it already exists as a function, alias, or program:
% which gpom gpom not found
Since it doesn’t already exist, we can add it to the list of aliases (mine are in ~/System/Zsh/aliases.zsh):
alias gpom=’git push -u origin master’
On Github I’ve posted my Z shell configuration, with the updated aliases file here.
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