If you are a software engineer or an IT student, chances are you work on terminal shell like bash. You can personalize bash to make yourself efficient and type less to help the lazy guy in you to do his job.

Type less with aliases

You don’t have to know a lot to do this, you just need to know about these two files:

~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile.

Depending on your operating system you will modify one of these. On linux machine typically you would use ~/.bashrc on mac you would use ~/.bash_profile .

In rest of text i will assume ~/.bashrc is the one used by your terminal.

You can create your custom commands and combine multiple commands into one.

for eg. add any or all of the following commands to end of your ~/.bashrc file.

  • If you always work in the same directory u could make an alias, say dev, to go to the directory from any location alias dev="cd /path/to/dev"

  • You can also write complex functions, for eg. below function combines creating and moving into a directory into one command. After adding below function to your file you could run mkcd myNewDirectory to make myNewDirectory

    function mkcd() {
mkdir $1
cd $1
}

Once you modify any of these files you have to either reopen a new terminal or source that file for eg. source ~/.bashrc

View already defined aliases

In case you forget your custom commands you can list all the aliases active in your terminal using command

$ alias

Above command will not list any functions you defined.

To see a specific alias u can specify its name as the argument

$ alias dev

View already defined functions

You can see all the functions, without their definition, using declare command

declare -F

If you want to see definition of functions as well, use

declare -f

You can also supply the name of specific functions

declare -f mkcd

Quickly change VIM theme

Just type this in ~/.vimrc file

:color desert

desert is the color theme here.