If you use the command-line all day, CLI improvements can add a huge boost to your workflow. One of the simplest ways to improve things is to make you

Mining your CLI history for good git aliases

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2024-06-21 20:00:04

If you use the command-line all day, CLI improvements can add a huge boost to your workflow. One of the simplest ways to improve things is to make your most used commands easier & faster to type, by creating aliases.

But which aliases? Which commands are most important for your usage? You can probably guess a couple, but it's hard to know for sure, and there's plenty you'll miss. Fortunately your CLI history already has all the answers, if you just know how to ask.

As a software developer I'm going to focus on git aliases here, but this applies equally well to any command-line tools you use heavily. I'm also assuming a bash-compatible shell, but the same concept should translate elsewhere easily enough.

The first step is to use history to do some digging and find out what commands you run most frequently. history prints every line you've run recently in your shell, in chronological order. That gives us the data we need, and with a little bash-fu we can start to get some answers.

That takes your history, filters for git commands, sorts them alphabetically, counts the repeated lines, and then sorts by the repeat count.