in Command-line Interface #Shell Script

Forcing yourself to use shell aliases

Fact: Shell aliases save you time.

Fact: Saving time increases your productivity.

Fact: Everybody wants to be more productive.

Fact: Retraining muscle memory can be a pain in the ass.

I have been fighting that last fact for a while now. I have the single character alias v pointed to vim. A whopping 67% decrease in characters I need to type to run vim. After 10+ years of typing in vim, I found it very hard to break the habit and transition over to the single character alias.

Then it hit me! Why not break vim so that I couldn't run it directly, thus forcing me to use the alias! And that's what I set out to do.

To start, I created a bin directory in my dotfiles, added a new file named vim and made it executable:

mkdir ~/.dotfiles/bin
touch ~/.dotfiles/bin/vim
chmod +x ~/.dotfiles/bin/vim

I then opened up the vim file and wrote the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [[ </span><span class="token function">ps</span> <span class="token parameter variable">-o</span> <span class="token assign-left variable">stat</span><span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token parameter variable">-p</span> <span class="token environment constant">$PPID</span><span class="token variable"> == "s" ]]; then
echo ""
echo -e "\e[1;31mUse the alias <span class="token variable"></span>v<span class="token punctuation">\</span><span class="token variable">\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[1;31m(╯°□°）╯︵ ɯıʌ\e[0m"
exit 1;
else
/usr/local/bin/vim $@
fi

The conditional checks to see if the script is being invoked directly or not. Without that I was running into issues with other scripts that would call vim and updating my $EDITOR didn't seem to resolve anything.

After the script was in place, I made a few adjustments to some variables in my .zshrc file. First, I updated my v alias to use the full path for my vim executable instead of just vim:

alias v="/usr/loca/bin/vim"

And updated my $PATH to check the bin I created in my dot files:

export PATH=~/.dotfiles/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH

With these changes made, I restarted my terminal and am now greeted by this whenever I try to run vim:

vim flip

Extreme? Yeah it is, but it's going to force me to adapt, which is a very good thing. I've spent the last week using that and have absolutely no regrets. I'm even planning to do the same thing with a handful of other aliases as well!

If you're interested in seeing which commands you type often and where you would benefit from some aliases, check out HuffShell, a gem for suggesting new aliases based on your history.

Also, my dotfiles are available for perusing and poaching if you're interested.