kknife lets you use the shortest substring to uniquely identify a knife sub command.
kknife also provides a k script to launch the lookups
k n e somenode = knife node edit somenode
k c u somebook = knife cookbook upload somebook
k e ff somefile = knife environment from_file somefile
k -l lists all your commands
k -d might tell you what's going wrong (debug).
All command line options at the end of the command are passed through to knife unmodified and work as knife specifies.
Shortcuts and ambiguous commands are currently statically defined in lib/kknife/lookup.rb. These will be user configurable/overridable. Some form of json/yml blob in ~/.chef/ should do.
'ff' => [ 'from', 'file' ],
'db' => [ 'data', 'bag' ],
'cs' => [ 'cookbook', 'site' ],
'bd' => [ 'bulk', 'delete' ],
'ne' => [ 'node', 'edit' ],
'ns' => [ 'node', 'show' ],
'rl' => [ 'run', 'list' ],
'd' => ['download'],
'e' => ['environment'],
'r' => ['role'],
'c' => ['cookbook'],