Raise your hand if you’ve ever stared blankly at a terminal, trying to remember the exact incantation you used to conjure an SSL certificate or

Taming Command Line Chaos: Macros to the Rescue!

submited by

Style Pass

2024-06-07 17:30:06

Raise your hand if you’ve ever stared blankly at a terminal, trying to remember the exact incantation you used to conjure an SSL certificate or spin up a virtual machine in the cloud. Command Line Interfaces (CLIs), while powerful, can be notoriously cryptic, especially with complex tools. Remembering all those flags and arguments? Let’s just say it’s not everyone’s idea of a good time.

If you’ve ever worked with a CLI with a laundry list of arguments (we’re talking 44 in the case of our own tool, Rot), you know the struggle is real. To wrangle these beasts, we’ve all resorted to wrapping commands in shell scripts or aliases—the infamous “bash spaghetti.” This approach may solve the repeatability problem, but it introduces new ones:

What if we told you there’s a solution that’s been around since the early days of computing? Enter macros—a way to create reusable commands. We’ve taken this old-school concept and baked it right into our CLI configuration.