Practical Shell Command-Line Tricks for Improved Developer Productivity
By
zdw
2mo ago· 9 min readen
75/100
Toasty
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Crusty in the right places. Worth the chew.
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Summary
This article provides practical shell command-line tricks to improve efficiency and productivity for developers and engineers. It addresses common inefficiencies in terminal usage and offers solutions for common problems like text editing, navigation, and command manipulation. The content is organized into universal shell tricks and Bash/Zsh-specific techniques, aiming to help users move beyond basic commands and optimize their workflow.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThere is a distinct, visceral kind of pain in watching an otherwise brilliant engineer hold down the Backspace key for six continuous seconds to fix a typo at the beginning of a line.
We've all been there. We learn ls, cd, and grep, and then we sort of... stop. The terminal becomes a place we live in-but we rarely bother to arrange the furniture.
We accept that certain tasks take forty keystrokes, completely unaware that the shell authors solved our exact frustration sometime in 1989.
Here are some tricks that aren't exactly secret, but aren't always taught either.
Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you'll understand why this list exists.
Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-speci...
