How do you manage your bash/zsh Aliases?

Question

How do you manage your bash/zsh Aliases?

Is there a tool to do this more easily and less "think of an alias -> open .zshrc-sourced-file -> edit -> close, reload .zshrc -> use alias"?

Answer 1

I rarely add or edit my aliases any more, but I still have and occasionally use:

alias savealiases='alias > ~/.bash-aliases'

I also have loadaliases, so I can create or change an alias in one shell (terminal window or tab, tmux window, ssh session, etc) and easily load it into other running shells.

alias loadaliases='source ~/.bash-aliases'

To make sure my aliases are loaded when I login or start up a new shell, I have the following in my ~/.bashrc:

[ -e ~/.bash-aliases ] && . ~/.bash-aliases

Extremely primitive but it's worked well enough for me for over 20 years. If I need to do any fancy editing of my aliases, I have vi.

Answer 2

If you are not only interested in bash and zsh, you may be interested in a completely different method that was introduced by the UNOS command interpreter in 1980. This command interpreter implements persistent aliases that are stored in the file $HOME/.globals

This method is now available in bsh and in recent Bourne Shell version you may get from the Schily-Tools.

Please have a look at the recent Bourne Shell man page at:

http://schillix.sourceforge.net/man/man1/bosh.1.html

The reason why I mention this method is that complex alises in the Korn Shell syntax are hard to type with the correct quoting and the Bourne Shell implements (as an additional method besides alias) so called hash commands that allow to enter aliases in raw mode.

BTW: the correct way to save aliases for other shells that do not support persistent aliases is:

alias -p > file

If you just call alias with ksh93, you get output like this:

autoload='typeset -fu' command='command ' compound='typeset -C'

but when you call alias -p, you get:

alias autoload='typeset -fu' alias command='command ' alias compound='typeset -C'

As you see, you need alias -p because it returns something that can later be used as shell input again by calling:

. file

Edit: alias -p is not POSIX but no shell except bash seems to produce parsable output by default. Some shells never produce parsable output!

Shells that need -p for a parsableoutput are:

• Bourne Shell
• ksh93 (ksh88 does neither support parsable output nor -p)

bash permits -p...

BTW: dash does not support parsable output nor -p at all. zsh implements the equivalent of alias -pvia alias -L.