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Instant +100% command line productivity boost (dev.to)
44 points by gregorymichael on Aug 31, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



I'm constantly surprised how most people settle with single-line autocompletion (or no autocompletion) in the shell. _The_ plugin that helped me learn shell and be super productive is Auto-fu: https://github.com/HerringtonDarkholme/auto-fu.zsh (forked from https://github.com/hchbaw/auto-fu.zsh)

BAM, autocomplete menu in your shell.

The setup isn't straightforward; I've written a small guide here: https://gist.github.com/chenglou/03505022bc4598fcb80e523f868...

I struggled with git when I first used it. But when you have an autocomplete menu giving you the right commands and sub-commands at each turn it's pretty hard _not_ to learn git (the default porcelain anyway).

Seriously, why am I defending a good autocomplete in the shell, go try it =)


Wow. Learning grep and sed would apparently improve this guys speed by 100000% according to these metrics.


I might be the first to say it, but this is very useful. I use zsh now, but put up with bash for years because I thought (entirely incorrectly) that a new shell meant new syntax and a drop in productivity while I learned it - and I've just been too time poor to make that perceived investment over the past few years. Turns out zsh was a five minute install with oh-my-zsh and it's autocomplete beats the pants off bash with no compatibility issues that I've run into yet. This has somewhat opened my eyes to how much I can optimise day to day workflow with a small effort. I've switched to i3 for window management and use zsh regularly, and can't believe how much better it is for my day to day use. I am now very much looking forward to sitting down this morning and installing syntax highlighting!


I'm still a bit angry that all shell development (as glacial as it is) seems to focus on the blinkenlights, not on the language features. ksh93 is still superior to all the contemporary linux shells in this aspect.

(And Plan9 fandom, I'm aware of rc)


I find having your current dir on the prompt wastes way too much space since it is duplicated on every line. Just put it in the window title bar.


I don't have particularly strong feelings about this, but I like having the current working directory listed just so that I can see what it was was when any older commands were executed at a glance.


Somehow adding a theme adds 15% to my productivity? Bollocks. I laughed at the "I travel inside my directories a lot" - midnight commander will blow this guys mind. I installed midnight commander, and increased my productivity 132.45%!


Better delete this and go write your dev.to article to rake in the points before someone else does.


....points? They are giving away POINTS?!? Just like that, I can HAVE MORE POINTS?!?! What can I buy with those points?


Yeah, man! You haven't been cashing in your internet points??


15% might be a stretch, but having your current git branch, rvm/node version etc displayed saves a lot of pointless command typing if you're jumping around between a lot of different projects, branches and libraries in the shell all day


The only problem I have with zsh is it is sloooooow. Using prezto for a powerline with git repo status.

Trying to enter a huge repo like Emacs source.... it crawls to a halt.


fish shell with fisherman are better.

I just start it manually out of bash because occasionally commands don't work when pasted so I just temporarily exit for that.


I like The Silver Searcher a lot, but recently I've replaced it with Ripgrep. It's much, much faster.


Is there any way to configure line spacing in zsh on linux? I am using gnome terminal if that matters.


That's a gnome-terminal feature, not at the level of ZSH. There may be a css handle for lib-vte, but I'm not aware of that being an option otherwise. The KDE terminal emulator Konsole does support line spacing, opacity, and many other things gnome-terminal is missing.




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