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_posts/2020-05-19-right-way-to-learn-aliases.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: The right way to learn aliases
+date: 2020-06-04 16:48:45
+description: Just want to share how I managed to learn quite a lot of new and <b>useful</b> aliases. 
+tags: 
+---
+
+I was trying to master aliases for a long time, but with not much success. Articles like _5/10/30 most useful/handy/ aliases for linux_ didn't help much, as even if there was something useful for me, I ended up with adding that alias to my **.zshrc**, but never used it after. I think that the main reason was that I didn't know which command I need to replace with alias. It's like with Amazon - instead of buying something from the suggestions (which most of the time will end up collecting dust on the shelf), you should analyze your needs first and then buy a thing which will fulfill this need.
+
+Probably the best candidates would be the commands you use more often, and then just check which ones of them could be "aliased". After this idea popped in my mind I wrote the below one-liner which prints out top 10 (or more) most frequently used commands from your [history](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-History-Builtins.html):
+
+```bash
+$ history \
+| sed 's/^\s*[[:digit:]]\+\*\?\s*//g' \
+| sort \
+| uniq -c \
+| sed 's/^\s*//g' \
+| sort  -k1 -n -r \
+| head
+```
+
+which in my case outputs the following: 
+
+```bash
+996 ll
+362 git status
+275 git push
+228 git pull
+203 cd 
+131 git add -A
+87 git checkout master
+85 cd ..
+84 top | grep awesome
+83 ssh-add
+```
+
+Now let's check what can be replaced by aliases, (oh-my-zsh [plugins](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/master/plugins) could be the good source of aliases).
+
+ - `ll` is already an alias of `ls -lh`, not bad
+ - `git status/push/pull/checkout master` - can be replaced by `gst/gp/gl/gcm` (oh-my-zsh [git plugin](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/master/plugins/git) has quite a lot of aliases for git)
+ - `cd ..` - again, oh-my-zsh already has an alias for this command - `..`
+
+So now I just need to remember these 6 aliases (which would be easy, as I use those commands quite often)
+
+With a small addition to the command - grepping the output of `history` by the executable - you can print only commands related to one executatble, for example for `git` it would be:
+
+```bash
+$ history \
+| grep git \
+| sed 's/^\s*[[:digit:]]\+\*\?\s*//g' \
+| sort \
+| uniq -c \
+| sed 's/^\s*//g' \
+| sort  -k1 -n -r \
+| head
+```
+
+which in my case shows the following:
+
+```bash
+362 git status
+275 git push
+228 git pull
+131 git add -A
+87 git checkout master
+53 git rebase --continue
+49 git checkout -
+41 git stash pop
+40 git stash
+39 git merge master
+```
+
+And then for each command you can either create your own alias, search online, or, if you have oh-my-zsh installed, just search for existing ones, like:
+
+```bash
+$ alias | grep 'git status'   
+gsb='git status -sb'
+gss='git status -s'
+gst='git status'
+```