Grats on cooling the rate of posting while sticking around! :)

tig is my favorite replacement for git’s builtins for almost anything related to viewing repository status

asdf is my preferred language runtime manager, especially when paired with per-project .tool-versions files.

sl is a fun thing to install on servers to remind people to type carefully

Honestly, collecting a bunch of little bash scripts to scratch your own itches though is kinda where I’m at these days. I have a cute little snippet for quickly logging notes to myself:

#! /bin/bash
set -eou pipefail
WORK_NOTE_PATH="$HOME/.work_notes"
printf "\n---\n# $(date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")\n\n" >>"$WORK_NOTE_PATH"
vim + "$WORK_NOTE_PATH"

Easy modification (used elsewhere) is to take the arguments to that script and add them in addition to the date in the notes file.

Another variant is used to quickly generate dated and slugged notes for meeting minutes.

Not a command exactly, but I only recently learned about $CDPATH which is great when you’re traversing around large source trees. There are other tools for this, like fzf, but what I love about $CDPATH is it’s deterministic, allowing me to build a muscle memory about commands to move to a desired location. Prior to this I used a lot of aliases that are really just shortcuts to cd with a frequently accessed directory.

Instead of asking low-effort questions once a week what about writing a blog post what you learned during that week and submitting it here? I’d like that much more…

I have a shell command that I wrote called mb which I use kind of like mh or mblaze but on my mboxes. It still doesn’t work exactly as I’d like it to, and I’ve had to get into the habit of backing up my mailboxes as I have corrupted them a couple of times, but I find it is becoming my preferred way to interact with mail. Here’s a little show of the interface:

> mb  32  # "Jeff Kaufman's Writ  04-18 13:00  Web Audio Echo?
> mb  33  # eBay <ebay@ebay.co.u  04-19 03:08  =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=9C=85_Order_confirm
> mb  34  # "service@paypal.co.u  04-19 03:09  Receipt for your PayPal payment t
> mb  35  # Nicolas Petton <nico  04-19 14:18  Emacs 27.0.91 is out!
> mb  37  # "Nicky Case's Blog:   02-05 01:50  Mr. Sacks
> mb  38  # "Irreal: jcs" <news@  04-22 18:31  Learning Emacs With Macros

The hash characters mean that I can run the whole line as a command and it’ll pull up the message, without me losing the advantages of having some headers available. In a similar vein, I also have an lm command which I think I found in an article on here quite recently, but I’ve enjoyed using it a lot. It works like apropos, but once again lets me run any line as a command and get the man page straight away:

$ lm lisp
man 3 common-lisp-controller   # Common Lisp system management tool
man 1 lispmtopgm   # convert a Lisp Machine bitmap file into pgm format
man 1 pgmtolispm   # convert a portable graymap into Lisp Machine format
man 8 register-common-lisp-source   # internal clc commands
man 1 sbcl   # Steel Bank Common Lisp
man 1 zenlisp   # zenlisp interpreter

I had to use double dashes for the command you listed:

git log --decorate --graph --oneline --all

It’s neat thanks for sharing.

endcli

It closes the Amiga shell. Typing it means you’re done, phew.

!$ has been my favorite shell “command” lately. It inserts the last argument of the previous command. So, if I blame a file:

git blame this-file

And then I want to edit that file:

vim !$

It’s a decent time saver for me.

#screen emacs

fzf hands down. I never run it directly, but I have it baked into a ~/bin/fuzzy-filter script and many of my shell aliases so it’s a key part of my workflow especially for dealing with situations where you end up with “choose from a list of things with partially memorable names and partial suffixes of uuids or other nonesense”. Like if I want to exec into a running docker container I can drun foo and if there’s only one container who’s name matches foo, the command runs immediately with that container’s name. If there’s more then one match though, fzf pops up a fuzzy filterable list so I type some more to pick the correct container, then the command proceeds with that container name.

yes might be my favorite just because the source code isn’t a simple loop.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreutils/coreutils/master/src/yes.c

pushd/popd are pretty useful to, though I’m not sure shell builtins count as far as “terminal commands” go.

I collected a few favorites almost 20 years ago. Looking back at it now, there is one that I still use: color.

Really, though, asking for a favorite shell command is like asking for a favorite helper function in a programming language. The value of both lies largely in the surrounding context, in the system of names.

Perhaps not my favourite, but my most popular are:

$ cut -d';' -f2 ~/.zsh/history | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n20
  10088 git
   3405 vi
   3217 go
   2922 cd
   2050 l
   1521 fg
   1226 lc
   1042 goatcounter
    910 ls
    894 ag
    764 rm
    568 wm-brightness
    553
    386 cat
    373 psql
    353 reagent
    343 set-screen
    335 man
    318 alsamixer
    299 su

This doesn’t include piped commands (the grep in ls | grep), so it’s not a full list of everything I’ve run. I can’t be bothered to come up with a program to include that too 😅

My favourites are probably grep and sed, because they’re such useful pieces of plumbing that can fit in so many different situations.

The most useful custom command I have is probably age, to open ag search results in Vim:

# "ag edit" and "grep edit".
age() {
	vim +'/\v'"$1" +':silent tabdo :1 | normal! n' +':tabfirst' -p $(ag "$@" | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u)
}
grepe() {
	vim +'/\v'"$1" +':silent tabdo :1 | normal! n' +':tabfirst' -p $(grep "$@" | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u)
}

P.S. informational nitpick: it’s really a shell command, and not terminal command. A terminal just reads input and displays characters, and a command for that is an escape code which moves the cursor or whatnot, whereas the shell interprets the commands you type (while reading the input from the terminal, and sending the output back).

Heya, good to see you’re sticking around.

To add some interaction to these threads, how about we all try reply to another response, as well as posting our own?

My favourite shell command … I have a great fondness for the humble tree and tree -if, which see the look-directly-around-you, one-directory-at-a-time ls and gives you a map of the entire directory tree at once. It’s like going to an unfamiliar supermarket and having a bird’s-eye view, instead of having to check every aisle.

If I had to choose only one, it would be awk, but going through my history file it seems to be ls.

To replicate @arp242’s command:

awk -v OFS='\t' '{ c[$1]++ } END { for (i in c) print c[i], i; }' .bash_history  | sort -n

where I get

...
21	vi
22	sudo
23	mpv
24	git
34	cd
51	ssh
75	ls

Other noteworthy commands have to be pandoc and ffmpeg, although ffmpeg is one of those I can barley use (for something a bit more complicated that just simple format conversion) without looking the commands up.

Absolutely daily I use:

• l PATTERN [DIR]: list files matching pattern, recursively
• g PATTERN [DIR]: wrapper around grep with good defaults
• gg PATTERN: small wrapper around git-grep

(code is at https://leahneukirchen.org/dotfiles/.zshrc)