zsh tip of the day - global aliases

Most shells have aliases. Last week I started using a new (to me) feature in zsh aliases. Zsh lets you create arbitrary substitutions for the command line, not just the executable.

The simple example of a alias would create a new command that acts like another with some parameters added to it:

    alias ll='ls -l'

You can also alias other common patterns in zsh. Say, you noticed that you used | tail -n10 a lot in your shell. You can alias it like so:

    alias -g TT10='| tail -n10"
    history TT10
    (10 lines follow)

You can also make this tail macro a bit more useful by not fixing it to use 10 lines:

    alias -g TT='| tail -n'
    history TT 10
    (10 lines follow)

Of course you need to pick alias names that will not conflict with normal usage.

–

Michael Prokop commented that it caused headache just too often. Mainly because no matter how complicate your global alias name is: it will break your cmdline at least once. ;)

He provided two links for me to checkout.

Michael continues… just use your “global alias abbreviation” but instead of just typing it, you also press an abbreviation key (being ,. be default for grml). So just type ls -la L,. and it will expand to ls -la | less. It’s not as risky as the global aliases but it’s powerful as well. :)