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I have a bunch, but one that I rarely see mentioned but use all the time is memo(1) (https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/memo).

It memoizes the command passed to it.

  $ memo curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'

Manually clearing it (for example if I know the underlying data has changed:

  $ memo -c curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call

In-pipeline memoization (includes the input in the hash of the lookup):

  $ cat input.txt | memo -s expensive-processor | awk '...'

This allows me to rapidly iterate on shell pipelines. The main goal is to minimize my development latency, but it also has positive effects on dependencies (avoiding redundant RPC calls). The classic way of doing this is storing something in temporary files:

  $ curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call > tmpfile
  $ cat tmpfile | jq . | awk '...'

But I find this awkward, and makes it harder than necessary to experiment with the expensive command itself.

  $ memo curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'
  $ memo curl --data "param1=value1" https://some-expennsive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'

Both of those will run curl once.

NOTE: Currently environment variables are not taken into account when hashing.

3 months agoby aktau

> trash a.txt b.png moves `a.txt` and `b.png` to the trash. Supports macOS and Linux.

The way you’re doing it trashes files sequentially, meaning you hear the trashing sound once per file and ⌘Z in the Finder will only restore the last one. You can improve that (I did it for years) but consider just using the `trash` commands which ships with macOS. Doesn’t use the Finder, so no sound and no ⌘Z, but it’s fast, official, and still allows “Put Back”.

> jsonformat takes JSON at stdin and pretty-prints it to stdout.

Why prioritise node instead of jq? The latter is considerably less code and even comes preinstalled with macOS, now.

> uuid prints a v4 UUID. I use this about once a month.

Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/uuidgen.1.html

3 months agoby latexr

This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm most interested in finding on HN. How do other developers work, and how can I get better at my work from it?

What's always interesting to me is how many of these I'll see and initially think, "I don't really need that." Because I'm well aware of the effect (which I'm sure has a name - I suppose it's similar to induced demand) of "make $uncommon_task much cheaper" -> "$uncommon_task becomes the basis of an entirely new workflow/skill". So I'm going to try out most of them and see what sticks!

Also: really love the style of the post. It's very clear but also includes super valuable information about how often the author actually uses each script, to get a sense ahead of time for which ones are more likely to trigger the effect described above.

A final aside about my own workflows which betrays my origins... for some of these operations and for others i occasionally need, I'll just open a browser dev tools window and use JS to do it, for example lowercasing a string :)

3 months agoby soiltype

It's weird how the circle of life progresses for a developer or whatever.

- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment

- When I got a year or two of experience, I wrote tons of scripts and bash aliases and had a 1k+ line .bashrc the same as OP

- Now, as a more tenured engineer (15 years of experience), I basically just want a vanilla shell with zero distractions, aliases or scripts and use native UNIX implementations. If it's more complicated than that, I'll code it in Python or Go.

3 months agoby oceanplexian

I've written on this before, but I have an extensive collection of "at" scripts. This started 25+ years ago when I dragged a PC tower running BSD to a friend's house, and their network differed from mine. So I wrote an @friend script which did a bunch of ifconfig foo.

Over time that's grown to an @foo script for every project I work on, every place I frequent that has some kind of specific setup. They are prefixed with an @ because that only rarely conflicts with anything, and tab-complete helps me remember the less frequently used ones.

The @project scripts setup the whole environment, alias the appropriate build tools and versions of those tools, prepare the correct IDE config if needed, drop me in the project's directory, etc. Some start a VPN connection because some of my clients only have git access over VPN etc.

Because I've worked on many things over many years, most of these scripts also output some "help" output so I can remember how shit works for a given project.

Here's an example:

    # @foo
    
    PROJECT FOO
    -----------
    
    VPN Connection: active, split tunnel
    
    Commands: 
    tests: mvn clean verify -P local_tests
    build all components: buildall
    
    Tools:
    java version: 17.0.16-tem
    maven version: 3.9.11

Edit: a word on aliases, I frequently alias tools like maven or ansible to include config files that are specific to that project. That way I can have a .m2 folder for every project that doesn't get polluted by other projects, I don't have to remember to tell ansible which inventory file to use, etc. I'm lazy and my memory is for shit.

3 months agoby elric

Regarding the `line` script, just a note that sed can print an arbitrary line from a file, no need to invoke a pipeline of cat, head, and tail:

    sed -n 2p file

prints the second line of file. The advantage sed has over this line script is it can also print more than one line, should you need to:

    sed -n 2,4p file

prints lines 2 through 4, inclusive.

3 months agoby southwindcg

My fav script to unpack anything, found a few years ago somewhere

      # ex - archive extractor
      # usage: ex <file>
      function ex() {
          if [ -f $1 ] ; then
          case $1 in
              *.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.tar.xz) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
              *.rar) unrar x $1 ;;
              *.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
              *.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.zip) unzip $1 ;;
              *.Z) uncompress $1;;
              *.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
              *) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via ex()" ;;
          esac
          else
              echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
          fi
      }

3 months agoby alberand

While you're creating and testing aliases, it's handy to source your ~/.zshrc whenever you edit it:

    alias vz="vim ~/.zshrc && . ~/.zshrc"

I alias mdfind to grep my .docx files on my Mac:

    docgrep() {
      mdfind "\"$@\"" -onlyin /Users/xxxx/Notes 2> >(grep --invert-match ' \[UserQueryParser\] ' >&2) | grep -v -e '/Inactive/' | sort
    }

I use an `anon` function to anonymize my Mac clipboard when I want to paste something to the public ChatGPT, company Slack, private notes, etc. I ran it through itself before pasting it here, for example.

    anonymizeclipboard() {
      my_user_id=xxxx
      account_ids="1234567890|1234567890"  #regex
      corp_words="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  #regex
      project_names="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      pii="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      hostnames="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      # anonymize IPs
      pbpaste | sed -E -e 's/([0-9]{1,3})\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}/\1.x.x.x/g' \
      -e "s/(${corp_words}|${project_names}|${my_user_id}|${pii}|${hostnames})/xxxx/g" -e "s/(${account_ids})/1234567890/g" | pbcopy
      pbpaste
    }

    alias anon=anonymizeclipboard

It prints the new clipboard to stdout so you can inspect what you'll be pasting for anything it missed.

3 months agoby Noumenon72

Historical note: getting hold of these scripts by chatting to various developers was the motivation for the original 2004 "lifehacks" talk[1][2]. If you ever get into an online argument over what is a "life hack" and what isn't, feel free to use short scripts like these as the canonical example.

Otherwise, I am happy to be pulled into your discussion, Marshall McLuhan style[3] to adjudicate, for a very reasonable fee.

[1] https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

[2] https://archive.org/details/Notcon2004DannyOBrienLifehacks

[3] https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/woody-allen-gets-marshal...

3 months agoby dannyobrien

I use these two all the time to encode and cut mp4s.

The flags are for maximum compatibility (e.g. without them, some MP4s don't play in WhatsApp, or Discord on mobile, or whatever.)

    ffmp4() {
        input_file="$1"
        output_file="${input_file%.*}_sd.mp4"

        ffmpeg -i "$input_file" -c:v libx264 -crf 33 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags faststart "$output_file"

        echo "Compressed video saved as: $output_file"
    }

ffmp4 foo.webm

-> foo_sd.mp4

    fftime() {
        input_file="$1"
        output_file="${input_file%.*}_cut.mp4"
        ffmpeg -i "$input_file" -c copy -ss "$2" -to "$3" "$output_file"

        echo "Cut video saved as: $output_file"
    }

fftime foo.mp4 01:30 01:45

-> foo_cut.mp4

Note, fftime copies the audio and video data without re-encoding, which can be a little janky, but often works fine, and can be much (100x) faster on large files. To re-encode just remove "-c copy"

3 months agoby andai

I'm kicking myself for not thinking of the `nato` script.

I tend to try to not get too used to custom "helper" scripts because I become incapacitated when working in other systems. Nevertheless, I really appreciate all these scripts if nothing else than to see what patterns other programmers pick up.

My only addition is a small `tplate` script that creates HTML, C, C++, Makefile, etc. "template" files to start a project. Kind of like a "wizard setup". e.g.

  $ tplate c
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  }

And of course, three scripts `:q`, `:w` and `:wq` that get used surprisingly often:

  $ cat :q
  #!/bin/bash
  echo "you're not in vim"

3 months agoby abetusk

Some cool things here but in general I like to learn and use the standard utilities for most of this. Main reason is I hop in and out of a lot of different systems and my personal aliases and scripts are not on most of them.

sed, awk, grep, and xargs along with standard utilities get you a long long way.

3 months agoby SoftTalker

I have mkcd exactly ( I wonder how many of us do, it's so obvious)

I have almost the same, but differently named with scratch(day), copy(xc), markdown quote(blockquote), murder, waitfor, tryna, etc.

I used to use telegram-send with a custom notification sounnd a lot for notifications from long-running scripts if I walked away from the laptop.

I used to have one called timespeak that would speak the time to me every hour or half hour.

I have go_clone that clones a repo into GOPATH which I use for organising even non-go projects long after putting go projects in GOPATH stopped being needed.

I liked writing one-offs, and I don't think it's premature optimization because I kept getting faster at it.

3 months agoby yipbub

I keep meaning to generalize this (directory target, multiple sources, flags), but I get quite a bit of mileage out of this `unmv` script even as it is:

  #!/bin/sh
  if test "$#" != 2
  then
      echo 'Error: unmv must have exactly 2 arguments'
      exit 1
  fi
  exec mv "$2" "$1"

3 months agoby o11c

> ocr my_image.png extracts text from an image and prints it to stdout. It only works on macOS

The Mac Shortcut at https://github.com/e-kotov/macos-shortcuts lets you select a particular area of the screen (as with Cmd-Shift-4) and copies the text out of that, allowing you to copy exactly the text you need from anywhere on your screen with one keyboard shortcut. Great for popups with unselectable text, and copying error messages from coworkers' screenshares.

3 months agoby Noumenon72

One script I use quite often:

    function unix() {
      if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
        echo "Arg: $(date -r "$1")"
      fi
      echo "Now: $(date) - $(date +%s)"
    }

Prints the current date as UNIX timestamp. If you provide a UNIX timestamp as arg, it prints the arg as human readable date.

3 months agoby WA

A few I use are:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    # ~/bin/,dehex

    echo "$1" | xxd -r -p

and

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    # ~/bin/,ht

    highlight() {
      # Foreground:
      # 30:black, 31:red, 32:green, 33:yellow, 34:blue, 35:magenta, 36:cyan

      # Background:
      # 40:black, 41:red, 42:green, 43:yellow, 44:blue, 45:magenta, 46:cyan
      escape=$(printf '\033')
      sed "s,$2,${escape}[$1m&${escape}[0m,g"
    }

    if [[ $# == 1 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1
    elif [[ $# == 2 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2
    elif [[ $# == 3 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3
    elif [[ $# == 4 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3 | highlight 36 $4
    fi

I also use the comma-command pattern where I prefix my personal scripts with a `,` which allows me to cycle between them fast etc.

One thing I have found that's worth it is periodically running an aggregation on one's history and purging old ones that I don't use.

3 months agoby arjie

With `xsel --clipboard` (put that in an alias like `clip`), you can use the same thing to replace both `copy` and `pasta`:

    # High level examples
    run_some_command | clip
    clip > file_from_my_clipboard.txt
    
    # Copy a file's contents
    clip < file.txt

    # indent for markdown:
    $ clip|sed 's/^/    /'|clip

3 months agoby internet_points

Broadly, I very much love this approach to things and wish it was more "acceptable?" It reminds me of the opposite of things like "the useless use of cat" which to me is one of the WORST meme-type-things in this space.

Like, it's okay -- even good -- for the tools to bend to the user and not the other way around.

3 months agoby jrm4

Something I've long appreciated is a little Perl script to compute statistics on piped in numbers, I find it great for getting quick summaries from report CSVs.

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    # http://stackoverflow.com/a/9790056
    use List::Util qw(max min sum);
    @a=();
    while(<>){
        $sqsum+=$_*$_;
        push(@a,$_)
    };
    $n=@a;
    $s=sum(@a);
    $a=$s/@a;
    $m=max(@a);
    $mm=min(@a);
    $std=sqrt($sqsum/$n-($s/$n)*($s/$n));
    $mid=int @a/2;
    @srtd=sort @a;
    if(@a%2){
        $med=$srtd[$mid];
    }else{
        $med=($srtd[$mid-1]+$srtd[$mid])/2;
    };
    print "records:$n\nsum:$s\navg:$a\nstd:$std\nmed:$med\max:$m\nmin:$mm";

3 months agoby vilhelmen

I find that I like working with the directory stack and having a shortened version of the directory stack in the title bar, e.g. by modifying the stock Debian .bashrc

  # If this is an xterm set the title to the directory stack
  case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|rxvt*)
      if [ -x ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl ]; then
    PS1="\[\e]0;\$(dirs -v | ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl)\a\]$PS1"
      else
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:   \w\a\]$PS1"
      fi
      ;;
  \*)
      ;;
  esac

The script shorten_ds.pl takes e.g.

  0  /var/log/apt
  1  ~/Downloads
  2  ~

and shortens it to:

  0:apt 1:Downloads 2:~

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  my @lines;
  while (<>) {
    chomp;
    s%^ (\d+)  %$1:%;
    s%:.*/([^/]+)$%:$1%;
    push @lines, $_
  }
  print join ' ', @lines;

That coupled with functions that take 'u 2' as shorthand for 'pushd +2' and 'o 2' for 'popd +2' make for easy manipulation of the directory stack:

  u() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      pushd "+$1"
    else
      pushd "$@"
    fi
  }

  o() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      popd "+$1"
    else
      popd "$@" # lazy way to cause an error
    fi
  }

3 months agoby dcassett

I like this one.

  $ cat /usr/local/bin/awkmail
  #!/bin/gawk -f

  BEGIN { smtp="/inet/tcp/0/smtp.yourco.com/25";
  ORS="\r\n"; r=ARGV[1]; s=ARGV[2]; sbj=ARGV[3]; # /bin/awkmail to from subj < in

  print "helo " ENVIRON["HOSTNAME"]        |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  print "mail from:" s                     |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  if(match(r, ","))
  {
   split(r, z, ",")
   for(y in z) { print "rcpt to:" z[y]     |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j }
  }
  else { print "rcpt to:" r                |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j }
  print "data"                             |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j

  print "From:" s                          |& smtp;  ARGV[2] = ""   # not a file
  print "To:" r                            |& smtp;  ARGV[1] = ""   # not a file
  if(length(sbj)) { print "Subject: " sbj  |& smtp;  ARGV[3] = "" } # not a file
  print ""                                 |& smtp

  while(getline > 0) print                 |& smtp

  print "."                                |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  print "quit"                             |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j

  close(smtp) } # /inet/protocol/local-port/remote-host/remote-port

3 months agoby chasil

I have three different way to open file with vim: v: vim (or neovim, in my case) vv: search/preview and open file by filename vvv: search/preview and open file by its content

    alias v='nvim'
    alias vv='f=$(fzf --preview-window "right:50%" --preview "bat --color=always {1}"); test -n "$f" && v "$f"'
    alias vvv='f=$(rg --line-number --no-heading . | fzf -d: -n 2.. --preview-window "right:50%:+{2}" --preview "bat --color=always --highlight-line {2} {1}"); test -n "$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f1)" && v "+$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f2)" "$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f1)"'

3 months agoby sdovan1

The one I use the most is "cdn". It cds to the newest subdirectory.

So if you're in your projects folder and want to keep working on your latest project, I just type "cdn" to go there.

3 months agoby bemmu

I use my "dc" command to reverse "cd" frequently https://gist.github.com/GNOMES/6bf65926648e260d8023aebb9ede9...

Ex:

    > echo $PWD
    /foo/bar/batz/abc/123

    > dc bar && echo $PWD
    /foo/bar

Useful for times when I don't want to type a long train of dot slashes(ex. cd ../../..).

Also useful when using Zoxide, and I tab complete into a directory tree path where parent directories are not in Zoxide history.

Added tab complete for speed.

3 months agoby GNOMES

I have a bunch of little scripts and aliases I've written over the years, but none are used more than these...

alias ..='cd ..'

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

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

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

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

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

3 months agoby revicon

Nice! Tangentially related: I built a (MacOS only) tool called clippy to be a much better pbcopy. It was just added to homebrew core. Among other things, it auto-detects when you want files as references so they paste into GUI apps as uploads, not bytes.

  clippy image.png  # then paste into Slack, etc. as upload

  clippy -r         # copy most recent download

  pasty             # copy file in Finder, then paste actual file here

https://github.com/neilberkman/clippy / brew install clippy

3 months agoby nberkman

Share yours!

I use this as a bookmarklet to grab the front page of the new york times (print edition). (You can also go back to any date up to like 2011)

I think they go out at like 4 am. So, day-of, note that it will fail if you're in that window before publishing.

    javascript:(()=>{let d=new Date(new Date().toLocaleString('en-US',{timeZone:'America/New_York'})),y=d.getFullYear(),m=('0'+(d.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2),g=('0'+d.getDate()).slice(-2);location.href=`https://static01.nyt.com/images/${y}/${m}/${g}/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf`})()

3 months agoby interestica

> alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often (probably about once a month)

I genuinely wonder, why would anyone want to use this, often?

3 months agoby alentred

I like the NATO one.

It occurred to me that it would be more useful to me in Emacs, and that might make a fun little exercise.

And that's how I discovered `M-x nato-region` was already a thing.

3 months agoby a_e_k

Using 'copy' as a clipboard script tells me OP never lived through the DOS era I guess... Used to drive me mad switching between 'cp' in UNIX and 'copy' in DOS. (Same with the whole slash vs backslash mess.)

3 months agoby briansm

As a bonus, I prepend my custom aliases or scripts with my user name and hyphen (i.e helicaltwine-). It helps me recall rarely used scripts when I need them and forget the names.

3 months agoby helicaltwine

    alias mpa='mpv --no-video'

    mpa [youtube_url]

I use this to listen to music / lectures in the terminal.

I think it needs yt-dlp installed — and reasonably up to date, since YouTube keeps breaking yt-dlp... but the updates keep fixing it :)

3 months agoby andai

The Gen AI tooling is exceptionally good at doing these sorts of things, and way more than just "mkdir $1 && cd $1". For example:

I have used it to build an "escmd" tool for interacting with Elasticsearch. It makes the available commands much more discoverable, the output it formats in tables, and gets rid of sending JSON to a curl command.

A variety of small tools that interact with Jira (list my tickets, show tickets that are tagged as needing ops interaction in the current release).

A tool to interact with our docker registry to list available tags and to modify tags, including colorizing them based on the sha hash of the image so it's obvious which ones are the same. We manage docker container deploys based on tags so if we "cptag stg prod" on a project, that releases the staging artifact to production, but we also tag them by build date and git commit hash, so we're often working with 5-7 tags.

Script to send a "Software has successfully been released" message via gmail from the command-line.

A program to "waituntil" a certain time to run a command: "waituntil 20:00 && run_release", with nice display of a countdown.

I have a problem with working on too many things at once and then committing unrelated things tagged with a particular Jira case. So I had it write me a commit program that lists my tickets, shows the changed files, and lets me select which ones go with that ticket.

All these are things I could have built before, but would have taken me hours each. With the GenAI, they take 5-15 minutes of my attention to build something like this. And Gen AI seems really, really great at building these small, independent tools.

3 months agoby linsomniac

> cpwd copies the current directory to the clipboard. Basically pwd | copy. I often use this when I’m in a directory and I want use that directory in another terminal tab; I copy it in one tab and cd to it in another. I use this once a day or so.

You can configure your shell to notify the terminal of directory changes, and then use your terminal’s “open new window” function (eg: ctrl+shift+n) to open a new window retaining the current directory.

3 months agoby WhyNotHugo

I started writing way more utility scripts when I found babashka. Magic of clojure, instant startup, easy to shell out to any other command, tons of useful built in stuff, developing with the REPL. It’s just a good time!!

3 months agoby chamomeal

> url "$my_url" parses a URL into its parts. I use this about once a month to pull data out of a URL, often because I don’t want to click a nasty tracking link.

This sounds pretty useful!

Coincidentally, I have recently learned that Daniel Stenberg et al (of cURL fame) wrote trurl[1], a libcurl-based CLI tool for URL parsing. Its `--json` option seems to yield similar results as TFA's url, if slightly less concise because of the JSON encoding. The advantage is that recent releases of common Linux distros seem to include trurl in their repos[2].

[1]: https://curl.se/trurl/

[2]: https://pkgs.org/search/?q=trurl

3 months agoby spiffyk

> `rn` prints the current time and date using date and cal.

And you can type `rn -rf *` to see all timezones recursively. :)

3 months agoby sedatk

> alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often

I'm curious to hear some examples (feel like I'm missing out)

3 months agoby Tempest1981

on my ubuntu, `date -I` does iso dates

Also re: alphabet

    $ echo {a..z}
    a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

3 months agoby internet_points

I got a ccurl python script that extracts the cookies from my Firefox profile and then passes those on to curl, that way I can get webpages where I'm logged in.

3 months agoby sorenjan

The most useful script I wrote is one I call `posh`. It shorten a file path by using environment variables. Example:

  $ posh /home/ramrachum/Dropbox/notes.txt
  $DX/notes.txt

Of course, it only becomes useful when you define a bunch of environment variables for the paths that you use often.

I use this a lot in all of my scripts. Basically whenever any of my script prints a path, it passes it through `posh`.

3 months agoby cool-RR

This is one area that I've found success in vibe coding with. Making scripts for repetitive tasks that are just above the complexity threshold where the math between automating and doing manually is not so clear. I have copilot generate the code for me and honestly I don't care too much of its quality, extensibility, and are easy enough to read through where I don't feel like my job is AI pr reviewer.

3 months agoby javier123454321

My most important script has been to remap CapsLock as a kind of custom Meta key, that transforms (when pressed) the Space into Return, hjkl into arrows, io into PgUp/PgDn, and 1-9 into function keys. Now I have a 60% keyboard that takes 0 space on my desk. And I am reaaaally happy with this setup.

[that, plus LinkHint plugin for Firefox, and i3 for WM is my way to go for a better life]

3 months agoby lolive

Where are the one letter aliases? My life got better after I alias k=kubectl

3 months agoby fragmede

For tempe, recommend changing "cd" to "push" do you can "popd" as soon as you're done.

3 months agoby greenpizza13

I have a script called catfiles that I store in ~/.local/bin that recursively dumps every source file with an associated file header so I can paste the resulting blob in to Gemini and ChatGPT in order to have a conversation about the changes I would like to make before I send off the resulting prompt to Gemini Code Assist.

Heres my script if anyone is interested in as I find it to be incredibly useful.

find . -type f $ -name ".tf" -o -name ".tfvars" -o -name ".json" -o -name ".hcl" -o -name ".sh" -o -name ".tpl" -o -name ".yml" -o -name ".yaml" -o -name ".py" -o -name ".md" $ -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo "### FILE: $f ###"; cat "$f"; echo; done' sh {} +

3 months agoby cshores

Obviously, to each their own, but to me, this is an overwhelming amount of commands to remember on top of all the ones they are composed of that you will likely need to know anyway — regardless if all the custom ones exist.

Like, I'd have to remember both `prettypath` and `sed`, and given that there's hardly any chance I'll not need `sed` in other situations, I now need to remember two commands instead of one.

On top of that `prettypath` only does s/:/\\n/ on my path, not on other strings, making its use extremely narrow. But generally doing search and replace in a string is incredibly useful, so I'd personally rather just use `sed` directly and become more comfortable with it. (Or `perl`, but the point is the same.)

As I said, that's obviously just my opinion, if loads of custom scripts/commands works for you, all the more power to you!

3 months agoby lillesvin

I have a script/alias,named p, that allows me to task switch. It takes an issue and maybe an argument, and does a bunch of things if they make sense in context. It has grown over the years.

So 'p ISSUE-123' :

* creates a folder issues/ISSUE-123 for work files, containing links to a backed up folder and the project repository . The shell is cd'd to it

* The repo might get a new branch with the issue name.

* An IDE might start containing the project.

* The browsers home button brings you to a page with all kinds of relevant links:. The issue tracker, the CI, all kinds of test pages, etc...

* The open/save dialogs for every program gets a shortcut named'issue'

* A note is made in a log that allows me to do time tracking at the end if the week.

* A commit message template with the issue is created.

3 months agoby hyperman1

The scripts from my junk drawer (https://github.com/peterwwillis/junkdrawer) I use every day are 'kd' and 'gw', which use the Unix dialog command to provide an easy terminal UI for Kubectl and Git Worktrees (respectively)... I probably save 15+ minutes a day just flitting around in those UIs. The rest of the scripts I use for random things; tasks in AWS/Git/etc I can never remember, Terraform module refactoring, Bitbucket/GitHub user management, Docker shortcuts, random password generation, mirroring websites with Wget, finding duplicate files, etc.

3 months agoby 0xbadcafebee

My most used automation copies a file with rclone to backblaze blob storage, and puts the link into the clipboard. (for sharing memes)

and alias debian="docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/mnt/host -w /mnt/host --name debug-debian debian"

3 months agoby brainzap

Love it! I'll absolutely be borrowing some of these :)

On every machine of mine I tend to accumulate a bunch of random little scripts along these lines in my ~/.local/bin, but I never seem to get around to actually putting them anywhere. Trying to knock that habit by putting any new such scripts in a “snippets” repo (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/snippets); ain't a whole lot in there yet, but hopefully that starts to change over time.

3 months agoby yellowapple

These are great, and I have a few matching myself.

Here are some super simple ones I didn't see that I use almost every day:

cl="clear"

g="git"

h="history"

ll="ls -al"

path='echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}'

lv="live-server"

And for common navigation:

dl="cd ~/Downloads"

dt="cd ~/Desktop"

3 months agoby some_guy_nobel

I've started using snippets for code reviews, where I find myself making the same comments (for different colleagues) regularly. I have a keyboard shortcut opening a fuzzy search to find the entry in a single text file. That saves a lot of time.

As an aside, I find most of these commands very long. I tend to use very short aliases, ideally 2 characters. I'm assuming the author uses tab most of the time, if the prefixes don't overlap beyond 3 characters it's not that bad, and maybe the history is more readable.

3 months agoby hiq

Love this, lots of great ideas I'll be stealing :)

Folks interested in scripting like this might like this tool I'm working on https://github.com/amterp/rad

Rad is built specifically for writing CLI scripts and is perfect for these sorts of small to medium scripts, takes a declarative approach to script arguments, and has first-class shell command integration. I basically don't write scripts in anything else anymore.

3 months agoby amterp

As a fun game, I suggest feeding the entire piece to an LLM and asking it to create those scripts. The differences between Claude, GOT-5 and Gemini are very interesting.

3 months agoby rcarmo

Nice. I have a bash script similar to the one listed "removeexif" called prep_for_web which takes any image file (PNG, BMP, JPG, WebP), scrubs EXIF data, checks for transparency and then compresses it to either JPG using MozJPEG or to PNG using PNGQuant.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg

[2] https://pngquant.org

3 months agoby vunderba

> `nato bar` returns Bravo Alfa Romeo. I use this most often when talking to customer service and need to read out a long alphanumeric string, which has only happened a couple of times in my whole life. But it’s sometimes useful!

Even more useful is just learning the ICAO Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO Phonetic Alphabet, of which it is neither). It takes like an afternoon and is useful in many situations, even if the receiver does not know it.

3 months agoby haskellshill

Why dont we have mkcd in linux natively boggles my mind :)

3 months agoby sid-

A couple more standard approaches with fewer chars:

jsonformat -> jq

running -> pgrep

3 months agoby zeckalpha

The "scripts" I use the most that I am most happy with are a set of Vagrant tools that manage initialising different kinds of application environments with an apt cache on the host. Also .ssh/config includes to make it as easy as possible to work with them from VSCode.

I set this stuff up so long ago I sort of forgot that I did it at all; it's like a standard feature. I have to remember I did it.

3 months agoby exasperaited

I also have a radio script to play internet streams with mpv (?). Other random stuff

A password or token generator, simple or complicated random text.

Scripts to list, view and delete mail messages inside POP3 servers

n, to start Nautilus from terminal in the current directory.

lastpdf, to open the last file I printed as PDF.

lastdownload, to view the names of the n most recent files in the Downloads directory.

And many more but those are the ones that I use often and I remember without looking at ~/bin

3 months agoby pmontra

Here are some snippets that we've compiled over time:

https://snhps.com

They're not all necessarily the most efficient/proper way to accomplish a task, but they're nice to have on hand and be able to quickly share.

Admittedly, their usefulness has been diminished a bit since the rise of LLMs, but they still come in handy from time to time.

3 months agoby sitebolts

One I use a lot is kp, it kills a process listening to a particular TCP port.

  kp () {
           if [ -z "$1" ] then
                   echo "Usage: kp <port>"
                   return 1
           fi
           lsof -nP -iTCP:"$1" -sTCP:LISTEN | awk 'NR>1 {print $2}' | xargs kill -9
   }

3 months agoby nullgeo

Please note that 'each' is fundamentally different from 'xargs'.

  echo 1 2 3 | each "rm {}"

is the same as

  rm 1
  rm 2
  rm 3

while

  echo 1 2 3 | xargs rm

is the same as

  rm 1 2 3

I would rather say that 'each' replaces (certain uses of) 'for':

  for i in 1 2 3; do rm $i; done

3 months agoby teo_zero

An important advantage of aliases was not mentioned: I see everything in one place and can easily build aliases on top of other aliases without much thinking.

Anyways, my favourite alias that I use all the time is this:

    alias a='nvim ~/.zshrc && . ~/.zshrc'

It solves the ,,not loaded automatically'' part at least for the current terminal

3 months agoby xiphias2

https://codeberg.org/EvanHahn/dotfiles/raw/commit/843b9ee13d...

This can be replaced with

sed -n $1p\;$1q

Test it versus

head -$1|tail -1

3 months agoby 1vuio0pswjnm7

It's been a while since I haven't read something as useful!

There also some very niche stuff that I won't use but found funny

3 months agoby wiether

I had my hopes on this project RawDog using local smol sized LLMs but it hasn't been updated in a while. I feel like all this should be running easily in the background nowadays.

https://github.com/AbanteAI/rawdog

3 months agoby jimmySixDOF

17 years ago I wrote a short VBA macro that takes the high life’s range of cells, concatenates the values into a comma separated list, then opens the list in notepad for easy copy and further use. I can’t begin to count the number of executions by myself and those i have shared it with.

3 months agoby jwsteigerwalt

Regarding the `timer` script, it appears to block the shell. A way to avoid this would be to spawn a subshell for the sleep command like this: `( sleep "$1" && notify ... ) &`

3 months agoby omnster

This is really interesting, but I need the highlights reel. So I need a script to summarize Hacker News pages and/or arbitrary web pages. Maybe that's what I want for getting the juice out of Medium articles.

3 months agoby hughdbrown

I had youtube and serveit and some others, but pasta is really good, thanks!

3 months agoby desireco42

I did something similar with copy until I found this which works across remote terminals too:

`alias clip="base64 | xargs -0 printf '\e]52;c;%s\007'"`

It just sends it to the client’s terminal clipboard.

`cat thing.txt | clip`

3 months agoby botverse

One of my biggest headaches is stripping specific number of bytes from the head or tail of a binary file. and I couldn't find any built-in tool for that, so I wrote one in C++.

3 months agoby liqilin1567

and here's me still ctrl+r-ing for my commonly used methods

3 months agoby apricot13

`line 10` can be written as `sed -n 10p` (instead of head+tail)

3 months agoby internet_points

I have these kind of scripts live as functions in my .bashrc, kind of a noob, is there a reason beyond convension to store them individually in bin?

3 months agoby frodo8sam

if you use x0vnc (useful if you use a linux machine both from the attached screen and from vnc, and in a bunch of other scenarios), copy and paste to and fro the vnc client is not implemented, quite frustrating. here's 2 scripts that does that for you, I now use this all day. https://github.com/francoisp/clipshare

3 months agoby headgasket

I hope to see an operating system with these scripts as built-in, because they are so intuitive and helpful! Which OS will be the first to take this on?

3 months agoby SuperHeavy256

Lately I’ve been using caffeinate to run long running scripts without interruption from sleep on Mac. Nothing crazy but could be useful to newer devs.

3 months agoby CrimpCity

My most used function is probably the one I use to find the most recent files:

    lt () { ls --color=always -lt ${1} | head }

3 months agoby panki27

A lot of these scripts could be just shell aliases.

3 months agoby vzaliva

Interesting, but none of the links are working... codeberg.org isn't responding, it just spins forever.

3 months agoby encom

fish abbreviations >> bash aliases

3 months agoby senderista

Mkdir then cd into it, I just use ‘take’? Maybe this isn’t available by default everywhere?

3 months agoby PUSH_AX

> wifi toggle

this fella doesn't know what "toggle" means. in this context, it means "turn off if it's currently on, or turn on if it's currently off."

this should be named `wifi cycle` instead. "cycle" is a good word for turning something off then on again.

naming things is hard, but it's not so hard that you can't use the right word. :)

3 months agoby naikrovek

Thank you, I also stopped using aliases and have everything as scripts in my ~/bin

3 months agoby _gmkt

Some of these, especially text processing, is already built-in Nushell.

3 months agoby czertyaka

The markdownquote can be replaced by (at least in vim):

^ (jump to the beginning)

ctrl+v (block selection)

j (move cursor down)

shift+i (bulk insert?)

type ><space>

ESC

3 months agoby yegle

30% of the productivity hacks can be archived in vanilla Nushell.

3 months agoby thibran

Does anyone have links to other awesome articles like this?

3 months agoby blackhaj7

Love this. Gunna use plenty of these

3 months agoby blackhaj7

A lot can be done with just aliasing to the right tools:

alias df='duf'

alias ls='eza'

alias ll='eza -l'

alias cat='bat'

alias cap='bat -p'

alias man='tldr'

alias top='glances'

alias grep='rg'

alias ps='procs'

alias cd='z'

alias g='gitui'

alias gs='git st'

alias gp='git pull'

alias gu='git add . && git commit -m "Update" && git push'

alias check='shellcheck'

alias v='nvim'

alias len='wc -l'

alias uuid='uuidgen'

alias src='source ~/.zshrc'

3 months agoby akullpp

Not really a one liner but this comes in handy for quick dns on multiple hostnames:

https://gist.github.com/jgbrwn/7dd4b262c544f750cb0291161b2ec...

(actually avoids having to do a one liner like: for h in {1..5}; do dig +short A mail”${h}”.domain.com @1.1.1.1 )

Hmm speaking of which I need to add in support for using a specific DNS server

3 months agoby indigodaddy

in oh-my-zsh you can use `take` to do what mkcd does.

3 months agoby merksoftworks

These arent bad but much better if they were all flags to the cat command.

E.g. cat --copy

3 months agoby hshdhdhehd

Looks very useful!

3 months agoby weregiraffe

`perldoc perlrun`

3 months agoby ttflee

that was beautiful to read. command line ftw!

3 months agoby kwar13

4:20 PM - nice

3 months agoby duncangh

absolutely love these time savers!!

3 months agoby progforlyfe

mksh is already the MirBSD Korn SHell

3 months agoby munchlax

this is really great. at some point i gavenup on being more efficient on the terminal, but many pain points are solved by your work

3 months agoby banku_brougham

cool collection

3 months agoby holyknight

no offense but a lot of those script are pretty hacky they may work for the user but i would not use them without making sure to review them and adapt them to my workflow

3 months agoby samtrack2019