Aliases: Also Known as Terminal User's Best Friends

Some aliases that I find useful#

In all the following examples, the dollar sign $ at the beginning of commands represents the prompt, it should not be typed.

General-purpose#

List all aliases#

$ alias

Prints all of your aliases. If you have plenty of those, you might prefer to pipe this command with less to get a nice pager that allows you to easily nagivate them:

$ alias | less

Setting an alias in ~/.bash_aliases#

alias c='clear'

This would set c as a shortcut to clear. In order to use the newly created alias, you would have to close the terminal or type the following command in the terminal:

$ source ~/.bash_aliases

Clear the screen#

alias c='clear'

I like being absorbed into the emptiness of the terminal, so this one comes in handy to tidy up the work space.

Reset the terminal#

alias re='tput reset'

If for some reasons the terminal displays badly or display funky characters, it can usually be reset this way.

Exit from the terminal#

alias q='exit'

For exiting the terminal as if you were still in Vim!

Display all file extensions recursively from the current directory#

alias allextensions="find . -type f -name '*.*' | sed 's|.*\.||' | sort -u"

It comes in handy to spot if a file shouldn’t be there or to check for lower or uppercase extensions.

Find text inside files, including filenames#

alias findinfiles='ag --nobreak --nonumbers --noheading . | fzf'

In this example, the alias is set up with ag, a fast code-searching tool and fzf, a great fuzzy finder.

Reboot and shutdown the system#

alias reboot='systemctl reboot'
alias shutdown='systemctl poweroff'

This will reboot or power off the system without needing root privileges in most working conditions.

List and sort files and directories by modification time#

alias treeold='tree -hDF | less'

This requires the command tree to be installed. The parameters are (descriptions taken from man tree):

-h: Print the size of files in a human readable way.

-D: Print the date of the last modification time.

-F: Append a ‘/’ for directories, a ‘=’ for socket files, a ‘\*’ for executable files, a ‘>’ for doors (Solaris) and a ‘|’ for FIFO’s, as per ls -F.

Open files quickly with default applications#

alias o='xdg-open'

This will open files and URLs specified as argument in the default application detected.

Moving around#

If you are going to be working on projects for some time and require to cd into them, I have found the following to be useful:

$ cdnameOfProject  # instead of having to do cd /path/to/project/
$ # More examples:
$ cdcodeabbey  # For codeabbey.com
$ cdhackerrank  # For hackerrank.com
$ cdeuler  # For projecteuler.net
$ cdgit  # For all Github repositories

This is not advanced by any means, but it helps quite regularly! Since you can take advantage of tab completion, you can type cd (without adding a space) and then press TAB key to autocomplete the aliases.

alias ...='cd ../..'

Make it easier to navigate into deep directory structures by basically doing cd .. && cd .. to go back up two directories at once.

Listing files#

alias l='ls -CFh'
alias la='ls -Ah'
alias ll='ls -ahlF'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

Different ways to set up the command ls to quickly see the needed files. The parameters are (descriptions taken from man ls):

-A: Do not list implied . and ...

-C: List entries by columns.

-F: Append indicator (one of \*/=>@|) to entries.

-a: Do not ignore entries starting with .

-h: With -l and/or -s, print human readable sizes (e.g., 1K 234M 2G).

-l: Use a long listing format.

Python-related#

alias aNameOfProject='source /path/to/project/bin/activate'
alias aa='source ~/Programming/anaconda3/bin/activate'  # Example using Anaconda distribution

The purpose is to activate a specific virtual environment quickly. The command cd could be added to go to the related project also:

alias gNameOfProject='cd /path/to/project/ && ./.venv/bin/activate'

Where .venv would be the name of the virtual environment.

I like to activate environments starting aliases with a and go and activate at the same time starting aliases with g. This way, it feels like I am speaking the Vim language (cw for change word, for example).

alias da='deactivate'

This will deactivate a virtual environment.

alias p36='python3.6'
alias p='python3.7'  # Simply using `p` for main version of Python

Practical way to quickly open the desired Python version.

alias pyclean='find . -regex ".*\(__pycache__\|\.py[co]\)" -delete'

This will delete recursively all files and directories that match one of the following patterns in their name: __pycache__, .pyc or .pyo.

Conclusion#

I hope you will find at least one alias to improve your productivity. Of course, you are welcome to chime in with your own suggestions!