aliases and the .bash_profile

.gitconfig follow-up with .bash_profille

In my previous Git posts (here and here), I noted that one of the things I found really helpful was creating aliases to move around more quickly within Git.

Extending beyond the .gitconfig, I moved to my .bash_profile and added some more global shortcuts that fall into three buckets:

1. Git
2. Navigation
3. Commands

Git Shortcuts

$ git ci and $git st are nice ways to commit and check the status of my Git repo based on aliases I defined in my .gitconfig file, but I was curious if I could go even faster.

I decided to dedicate my g-key to git and added several additional keyboard shortcuts that I’ve found myself using even more frequently than the aliases in my .gitconfig file.

My current set up is:

#Git Shortcuts
alias gs='git status '
alias ga='git add '
alias gb='git branch '
alias gc='git commit'
alias gh="git log --pretty=format:'%h %ad | %s%d [%an]' --graph --date=short"
alias gd='git diff'
alias go='git checkout '
alias gk='gitk --all&'
alias got='git '
alias get='git '

Note: the aliases for got and get are just common typos for git, so it’s just a little guard rail for me. (I find I am more prone to make these errors if I’m saying the command in my head…)

Navigation Shortcuts

As I get comfortable with the terminal, the hardest part for me is navigating through my directory tree. Since I had some pretty common destinations, I decided to make shortcuts using an alias. I updated my ~/.bash_profile file to include the following Directory shortcuts.

#Directory Shortcuts
alias goHome='cd ~/' #Home directory
alias goDocs=' cd ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Documents' #iCloud Documents
alias goCode='cd ~/Documents/_Coding' #A directory with all of my projects

Command Shortcuts

The shortest section of my .bash_profile right now is my command shortcuts section. I imagine it will grow in time as i realize more and more things that I can do with the terminal and find myself typing the same command in over and over.

Right now, the only thing I have saved is a command to reload my profile when I make changes.

Since any time you make a change to your .bash_profile, in order for those changes to be accessible within the terminal, you need to either:

1. Close and reopen your terminal for the changes to be accessible, or
2. Manually reload your profile

To help me with the following, I added a bashReload command in a #Command Shortcuts section of the ~/.bash_profile file:

alias bashReload=' . ~/.bash_profile'

Notes about .bash_profile and Mac

Your .bash_profile file is located in your user’s directory, but as the . indicates, it’s hidden.

To find and edit it, you can use the following three commands:

cd ~/ # This takes you to your user's home directory (in case you were currently located
ls -a # Lists all of the contents within the directory; the -a option means that it will not ignore entries starting with .
open .bash_profile # Opens the file using the default application for text documents

When you run the $ ls -a command, you may see multiple different bash files. For example, I see the following:

.bash_history
.bash_profile
.bash_profile-anaconda.bak
.bash_profile.pysave
.bash_sessions
.bashrc

It appears that I have separate profiles for anaconda, which is a program for python and pysave. Then there’s .bashrc. I found Josh Staiger’s write up on the difference between .bash_profile and bashrc to be really easy to follow.

Quoting from the bash manual page:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the —login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The —noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands from the files ~/.bash_logout and /etc/bash.bash_logout, if the files exists.

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the —norc option. The —rcfile file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of ~/.bashrc.

As Josh notes, however, MacOS defaults to a login shell by default, and therefore first looks at .bash_profile.

All of this means that I might optimize later, should I use Linux, by migrating my config commands to .bashrc, but for now, .bash_profile works well because I’m on a Mac.