Finding Which Commands I use all the Time

I spend a lot of time in a terminal and extensively use tmux & vim to write code and manage systems. If you also spend a lot of time in a shell (sh, bash, zsh) you know that aliases can greatly help with productivity through the reduction in typing and typing mistakes.

In this article, I will show how I use your shell history to find out what commands I type all the time and then use this to create new aliases to help speed up my workflow.

Using Aliases

Most shells come with some already set, such as ll for ls -alF. To get a listing of all your current aliases run:

$ alias
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias l='ls -CF'
alias la='ls -A'
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

To get the details of the current directory without having to remember -alF run:

$ ll
-rw-r--r--    1 mark  staff     703 27 Oct 11:01 tsconfig.json
-rw-r--r--    1 mark  staff  149291 24 Mar  2022 tsconfig.tsbuildinfo
drwxr-xr-x    7 mark  staff     224  2 Jun 10:03 utils/
-rw-r--r--    1 mark  staff  399679 24 Mar  2022 yarn-error.log
-rw-r--r--    1 mark  staff  422743 27 Oct 11:01 yarn.lock

You can add any others yourself to your shell init script such as .bash_profile. Here are a few I use:

alias dc='docker-compose'
alias ggraph='git log --oneline --graph'
alias gs='git status'
alias gversion='echo $(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags)-$(git log -1 --format=%h)'
alias k='kubectl'
alias tf='terraform'

I use docker-compose and terraform all the time so I have aliased them to dc and tf respectively. The gversion alias helps me know what the current version of my code will produce when I build and tag a docker image.

Finding New Aliases

Recently I was looking at my day-to-day workflow and how to speed up what I’m typing. I decided to look at my history and see what I typed a lot, and here is what I found.

Running the following in a terminal after a few hours shows:

  $ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 
  27 czctl
  28 curl
  29 k9s
  34 tmux
  38 k
  46 npm
  58 more
  68 ls
  71 vi
  84 yarn
  91 cd
 180 git

I’m already making good use of my alias for kubectl as k, but I seem to type git and yarn a lot, so I’ve added aliases for them.

alias g='git'
alias y='yarn'

Conclusion

Shell aliases can be a powerful tool for developers to customize and streamline their command-line workflow, increasing productivity and reducing errors. By looking at your history you can identify commands that are run frequently and create aliases for them.