[PLUG] remembering often-used commands

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Sat Mar 18 17:38:15 UTC 2006


# from John Jordan
# on Saturday 18 March 2006 08:02 am:

>I'd still like something where I could just point and click to select
>often-used commands. Something like bookmarks in Firefox. As
>efficient as Linux users have made the command line, surely
>there's something out there. Maybe a "terminal" is not what I
>should be looking for.

In my experience, you really don't want much more than a text editor for 
collecting snippets of commands.  Consider what a "click to run" 
interface would imply:

  o  You must be in the right working directory or else enter absolute 
paths to all filenames.  Some commands (e.g. ps2pdf) expect to write 
output into the working directory unless explicitly told otherwise.

  o  You always want to run the command with the same filename 
arguments.  Otherwise, such a system would have to prompt you for one 
or more filenames and would either do this with a plain text-entry 
dialog or a file-chooser (both of which (depending on the GUI toolkit) 
can have tab complete, at the expense of some extra code.)

If the commands of which you speak really are repetitive and predictable 
enough such that the above two points are non-issues, then it is best 
to either make them into cron jobs or scripts.  Cron jobs run on a 
timer, scripts run when you say "name_of_my_script".

As for the rest...  Given that the shell has tab-complete, typing most 
commands and filenames usually reduces to a series of 2-3 letter groups 
joined by tabs for me.  I realize that doesn't help if you don't 
remember the first couple letters.  My own memory is also less than 
perfect, so I have a few directories full of snippets in various 
languages for just this reason.  Grep does a great job of digging up 
history that no amount of head-scratching would ever manage to 
correctly retrieve.

--Eric
-- 
Turns out the optimal technique is to put it in reverse and gun it.
--Steven Squyres (on challenges in interplanetary robot navigation)
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