I’d rather optimize for the 99% case, which is me getting shit done on my machine, than refuse to use convenient stuff for the sake of maybe not forgetting a command I can perfectly just look up if I do legitimately happen to forget about it. If I’m on a remote, I already don’t have access to all my usual software anyway, what’s a couple more aliases? To me this sounds like purposefully deciding to slow yourself down cutting paper with a knife all the time cause you may not have access to scissors when you happen to sit at someone else’s desk.

Working in tech I seriously curtailed customization on my machine to only what I really wanted and this was because I would so often have to deal with defaults or other peoples customization’s.

This is why i refuse to use zsh. I have nothing against it but if i get paged at 3 in the morning and need to access a production server I need my as little friction as possible.

When Amazon or canonical or whoever start to ship servers with zsh instead of bash then I’ll look into it, but ultimately bash, like sh, have a different target audience than zsh. Bash and sh are designed as system admin or ops utilities first and zsh is more geared towards developers. They are incredibly similar in design and syntax, it’s really just philosophically, who is this tool best suited for?

Fwiw if we could start it all from scratch and have our choice of today’s options, i think oils does a lot right, and the way it’s implemented especially wrt whitespace parsing is actually consistent and sane and has a robust test suite to back it up, especially compared to the old guard.

But again, until somebody starts shipping oils I’m going to keep using bash.

My philosophy for things like aliases and functions is to only create them for things that i cannot commit to memory and type quickly. For example a common alias is ll which often expands to ls -l. What this does to me is i tend to use that reflexively only to find out i need a different invocation anyway like ls -1 or ls -alFH .

But let’s say i need to know what server in my ceph cluster is the manager currently so i can go to the WebUI that’s something I’ll probably not be able to remember:

# relies on yq4
ceph_dash ()
{
    if [[ -z ${CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR:-} ]]; then
        CEPH_DASHBOARD=$(ceph mgr services | yq '.dashboard');
        CEPH_DASHBOARD_IP=$(sed -E 's|https?://([0-9\.]+):8443/?|\1|' <<< "$CEPH_DASHBOARD");
        CEPH_DASHBOARD_HOST=$(nslookup "$CEPH_DASHBOARD_IP" | sed -E 's/^.+name = ([^\.]+).+$/\1/' | head -1);
        CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR=$(sed -E "s|$CEPH_DASHBOARD_IP|$CEPH_DASHBOARD_HOST|" <<< "$CEPH_DASHBOARD");
        export CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR;
    fi;
    if [[ ${XDG_SESSION_TYPE:-} == tty || -n ${FORCE_TTY:-} ]]; then
        echo "$CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR";
    else
        xdg-open "$CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR";
    fi
}

This is more complicated than it needs to be but basically once the mgr is determined it’ll be stable so i cache the result. If i find it has moved i can unset $CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR or prepend the function call like CEPH_DASHBOARD_ADDR= ceph_dash. The hostname nslookup is optional but nice to have. Then if you have a desktop it should open in the default browser or whatever you have that handler pointed to. If it’s just a tty it’ll echo it out for you. You can also do FORCE_TTY=anything ceph_dash to get the echo even if you have a desktop

Anywhere i administer ceph i need to have the _admin keys available so i have a script to place those and my functions all in one go.

All that being said, my mentor who got me into tech is neurodivergent like myself and he has like a whole bespoke framework where depending on the folder he’s in certain aliases and functions will be available and a special global scope. He’s gone in on zsh because it helps him to pair with other engineers, and both of those decisions suit him. We work on a team together now again and i wouldn’t dream of imposing my decisions on him any more than I’d allow it in reverse.

You end up learning cool stuff that way, like i asked him how he handles the on-call situation, he had been doing bash for decades and he can model the subtle and not so subtle differences between bash and zsh. As for aliases and functions he keeps a copy of his global set in his sshconfig that runs if the server allows running RemoteCommand on connection which i thought was super cool.

This is always my concern with creating git aliases, and find it’s just as easy to use the reverse search in shell to find git commit -a --amend --no-edit rather than make up an alias which just works on one machine. Also, a lot of the time I’m sharing my screen or sending the output to someone, and don’t want to have to explain what gcane means.

I do like the syntax highlighting plugin, that was new to me.

Configuration Management tools? In which scenario do you SSH into machines where you don’t have root privs and still need elaborate shell commands?

Its not hard to copy your aliases to other machines. All my machines run NixOS, so they all have my home manager config. I would assume you could easily copy shell configs with tools like ansible as well. For aliases it’s as simple as copying your .bashrc over.

At my last job where I was regularly doing this, every user had a home directory that would be mounted onto any server we accessed, so all of us could have whatever shell customizations we’d like.