My Favorite Tools From My Toolbox

Since the second half of last year, I started to build a collection of shell scripts that make some of my special use cases easier to handle. I want to share some of them with you.

Wave Goodbye for My Aliases (Most of Them)

I had a huge collection of aliases, many of them copied from other people, and it became a mess. There are two rules I made for handling this earth-shattering crisis:

  • If an alias is only used for typing less without complex commands, I delete it. I prefer to type more and forget less. (For example: remove the ga alias, type git add .)
  • If the alias had some sort of complex command, I convert it to a script.
  • If I don’t want to write down docker compose for the eleventh million time today, I create a command with a shorter name which can receive arguments and do the same thing.

I made some wrapper scripts that can make the base command shorter, receive all the same arguments, and can contain methods for use cases that I prefer.

So when I type dc up, it is the same as docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans. This can sound like a contradiction to the first rule, but there is no time when I don’t want to use docker-compose up without the -d and --remove-orphans flags. And it is easier to review in a script than a multi-hundred-line-long alias list.

Timeboxing

I used to love the Pomodoro technique, but it had too many rules for me. I just want to control my time spent at a computer. Still, I made a script called pom (as a tribute) for starting a countdown timer.

pom -s 45 will store a file with the timestamp of the date and time when the countdown will expire. pom will read the timestamp and print the remaining time like this: 44:51. This way, it can be rendered with interval calls, which means it’s perfect for a status bar.

Dev containers

(This is not about “devcontainers”, I did not know about them at the time)

The script called devc will pull a Docker image, start a container, and enter it with a shell. This itself is not a big deal, but after exit, it automatically commits the changes of the container to a new image.

By the naming of the image and container, every time I run devc ubuntu, I will work with the changes from the last time I used devc ubuntu. Let’s say it together, children: devc ubuntu.

Running Composer or PHP with Exact Versions in Containers

I mostly work on PHP projects (no Lambo), and sometimes it is handy to run a Composer or PHP command with a specific version.

For example, running composer install with a specific version of Composer and PHP:

domp 7.0 install

Or starting a PHP 7.4 REPL:

dhp 7.4 -a

Emu

This is a wrapper for QEMU, which is a “generic and open-source machine emulator and virtualizer”. I use it for testing in other operating systems. The main motivation behind this script is QEMU has a lot of flags, and I just want a base command with the same flags every time.

 emu -s 23G -i uhu-linux-3.iso -m 4G -c 2

This command will start a virtual machine with 23GB of storage, 4GB of memory, and 2 cores, and it will boot from the uhu-linux-3.iso file and save my life. I could use Quickemu as well.

Tmux Sessionizer

Everyone and their grandmother has a spin on this topic, I keep mine for another time.