diff -y -W 200 file1 file2
Shows a side by side diff of 2 files with enough column width to see most of what I need usually.
I have actually aliased this command as diffy
ctrl-r
searching bash history
du -sh * | sort -h
shows size of all files and dirs in the current dir and sorts them in ascending order so you can easily see the largest files or dirt ant the end of the list
ls -ltr
Shows the most recently modified files at the end of the listing.
ls and cd
I do love
fuck
.More of a shortcut,
CTRL + A + D
to exit the current session (exits a sudo su first, then a ssh, then the actual terminal)deleted by creator
I use “ping” every time I suspect my internet might be going a bit slow.
xdg-open FILE
- opens a file with the default GUI app. I use it for example to open PDFs and PNG. I have a one letter alias for that. It can also open a file explorer in the current directoryxdg-open .
. Should work on any compliant desktop environment (gnome/kde).cd
thenls
thencd
thenls
maybe I’ll throw als -a
I use -A instead, which doesn’t show “.” and “…”
GNU Parallel
Saving this thread for later, but I use rsync -a a lot.
clear
because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminalI almost never use clear because i’m afraid if i will need the text later.(just like infinity tab number on firefox)
Uhhh…
sudo su
Don’t be like me
sudo -i
I went a little overboard and wrote a one-liner to accurately answer this question
history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|head -5
Note:
history
displays like this for me20622 2023-02-18 16:41:23 ls
I don’t know if that’s because I setHISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
in .bashrc, or if it’s like that for everyone. If it’s different for you change-f 5
to target the command. Use-f 5-7
to include flags and arguments.My top 5 (since last install)
2002 ls 1296 cd 455 hx 427 g 316 find
g
is an alias for gitui. When I include flags and arguments most of the top commands are aliases, often shortcuts to a project directory.Not to ramble, but after doing this I figured I should alias the longest, most-used commands (even aliasing
ls
tol
could have saved 2002 keystrokes :P) So I wrote another one-liner to check for available single characters to alias with:for c in 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; do [[ ! $(command -v $c) ]] && echo $c; done
In .bash_aliases I’ve added
alias b='hx ${HOME}/.bash_aliases'
to quickly edit aliases andalias r='source ${HOME}/.bashrc'
to reload them.Helix?
Yup! Migrated from VSCodium; wanted to learn a modal editor but didn’t have the time or confidence to configure vim or neovim. It’s been my go-to editor for 2+ years now.
I’ve been using vi (just the basics) for ~4 years, I don’t think I could be arsed to pick up the keybindings the other way around lol. I’ve heard very good things about Helix, of course
As another longtime Vi user - I had a hell of a time & wound up switching back lol
I think for a lot of folks Helix would be intuitive. Vi has her hooks in me, though.
Holy shit, you’re a madman
tldr
because I am too impatient to read through man pages or google the exact syntax for what I want to do.There are exactly three kinds of manpages:
- Way too detailed
- Not nearly detailed enough
- There is no manpage
I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I’m grateful for them.
But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand.
grep
helps if you already know the switch, which isn’t always.You could argue commands like this don’t have “arguably most common usecases”, so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.
Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was “do one thing, and do it well”? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it’s flustering.
tldr is the first of 4 ways I rtfm. Then -h, man, and then the arch wiki
i never use man at all. It’s just too confusing.
I can appreciate that. Appologies if you know this already, but just don’t like them. Here are some tips.
It helps a lot to get title/subtitle/flag highlighting. By default man pages are hard to use simply because of how dense they are. It’s much easier to skim when you can separate the parts you are looking for up front from the text.
Don’t forget ‘/’, ‘n’, and ‘N’. First way to use man pages more effectively is to search them easily. And you can search via regex. Often I’m looking for more info on a particular flag. So I’ll press ‘/’ followed by ‘^ *-g’. For a g flag.
Take notes on the side. It saves you time later. Your future self will thank you. And you learn a lot by skimming them.
Man pages can be intimidating/confusing, but, imho, it’s worth training that skill. Even if you are slower up front, it’s totally worth it.
Sudo !!
It reruns the last command as sudo.
Pretty useful since I’m always forgetting.
Most commands soon followed by sudo !!