Identifying potential shell aliases

I was setting up a new GitHub codespaces environment and wanted to create some dotfiles that would automatically install and configure my local macOS environment.

I noticed that I have almost no aliases. Let's fix that.

Some suggested aliases I saw online instantly seemed like great ideas!

alias ..="cd .."
alias ...="cd ../.."
alias ll="ls -la"

This led me to wonder how often I actually run these commands and if there are other potentially good aliases that are specific to my usage.

ZSH stores a file in your home directory called .zsh_history.

You may have a different history file. Run echo $HISTFILE to see what your system uses.

My system is configured to store 50000 lines in this history file (see your size with echo $HISTSIZE). At the time of writing, my .zsh_history file had 2465 lines (historical commands).

The contents of this file look like:

> tail -n 5 ~/.zsh_history
: 1664040286:0;clear
: 1664040287:0;git statys
: 1664040290:0;git status
: 1664040291:0;git diff
: 1664040294:0;tail -n 5 ~/.zsh_history

Looks like it contains a unix timestamp and :0;, followed by the command itself (what we want). Let's parse it!

I am going to use ruby to do this as I am trying to learn the language. I would typically reach for Python here.

The code that I wrote to do this can be found here but essentially performs the steps below:

Here are the 25 top used commands from my ~/.zsh_history file:

clear: 348
git status: 237
yarn dev: 138
ls: 127
git diff: 84
cd ..: 64
./scripts/dev.sh: 60
./scripts/deploy.sh: 43
pytest -rav: 35
code .: 34
python3 main.py: 32
git push: 28
cd client: 28
black .: 24
git add -A; git commit -m 'WIP': 23
cd server: 23
./scripts/test.sh: 20
cd dev: 19
yarn: 18
git checkout main: 18
pytest: 14
python3 -m unittest server_test.py: 14
git pull: 13
ruby -v: 11
git log: 11

I already have a couple of these aliases set but one particular command sticks out.

git add -A; git commit -m 'WIP' is a pretty long command that I use to quickly save the current state of my work (I know this is gross and I should either stash or come up with a better commit message 🤷).

Let's create a new alias for this:

alias gw="git add -A; git commit -m 'WIP'"

BOOM! 31 characters to 2.

We have identified our top used commands which could make good candidates for shell aliases. We currently have a naive score for each commands "usefulness" which is just the total count.

A good candidate for an alias seems likes a command that is both long (git add -A; git commit -m 'WIP') and used often. We could improve this score by creating a weight for each variable (count and length) but I'll leave that as an exercise for another time.

This probably won't help anyone at all... BUT, it was a fun way for me to explore my shell command usage while learning ruby. If you are interested, my dotfiles are located here.