Speed up your Workflow in the Terminal: New Premium Tutorial
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Speed up your Workflow in the Terminal: New Premium Tutorial

on Mar 16th 2011 with 14 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Topic: Command Line / Terminal
  • Availability: Premium Exclusive
  • Format: Video

The terminal is great, especially for web development, but typing out long, obscure commands and directories deep in the filesystem can get tedious. Aliases and functions allow you to create short, memorable names for commands you type all the time. In this Premium video tutorial, we will learn how to create and use both of these to speed up your command line workflow.

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  • benjamin

    I will be using your function to set up new project sites quickly. Thanks for that gem!

  • Emprejorge

    This work in Windows? or just mac or linux?

    • http://mycoffeecupisempty.com Floris

      Windows their dos prompt is not really a terminal if you ask me.

      Most of the Mac terminal commands (since it’s UNIX BSD under the hood for OSX) works on Linux as well.

  • http://www.cansurmeli.com C@N

    Hi all.

    Great tutorial. Really widened my vision.

    I knew some about Terminal but those alias things took me to a new, higher level.

    Thanks and kind regards. :))

  • Mark

    Loved this tutorial, made me rethink my workflow!

  • Jayphen

    Just a warning for those watching – mxcl strongly advises not to use Homebrew with sudo
    https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation

  • Jayphen

    A few other ideas to add…

    # show the grepped string with colour
    alias grep=”grep –color=auto”

    # back to the previous directory
    alias back=”cd -”

    # another way of quickly going up one or two folders
    alias ..=”cd ..”
    alias …=”cd .. ; cd ..”

    # open a manual page in Textmate
    tman () {
    MANWIDTH=160 MANPAGER=’col -bx’ man $@ | mate
    }

    # make a new directory and cd to it
    make() { mkdir -p “$@” && cd “$@”; }

    • http://glavelle.co.uk Giles Lavelle
      Author

      Hey, these are all great, thanks for sharing! If you wanted to add these to my file on Github, I’d be happy to accept a pull request. Then everyone can benefit from them.
      Otherwise I could just paste them in, if that’s ok with you.

  • http://sourcesketch.com/ Lamar Hines

    Very nice screencast, I enjoyed the talk. I recently put together a similar series on productivity and the command line:

    http://sourcesketch.com/development/command-line-me-become-friends-with-unix-on-macosx/

    http://sourcesketch.com/productivity/command-line-and-me-pimp-my-prompt/

    http://sourcesketch.com/productivity/command-line-me-quick-tips/

    These links detail using macports, setting up a custom layout for aliases and functions and general quick tips.

    Also, nice note on creating temporary session aliases, I didn’t realize that, but it makes a lot of sense. You could probably create a function to concatenate the new aliases into the file that you use to hold your custom aliases.

  • http://www.nunomedia.com Nuno

    Hi guys, for some reason, I can not download this tutorial in the tuts+ premium members area… It only allows me to watch it… I need to watch later without internet… Thanks…

    • http://razerdesign.com Kevin

      From what I’ve seen this is how many are, though not all. Hopefully they’ll put up the .mov or .flv for the movie soon.

    • robert

      right click save as

      • http://www.nunomedia.com Nuno Marques

        There is no right click… Admin, please can you solve this?

    • Krosh

      my tutorial for the tutorial:

      - open the network-tab in firebug
      - click on “View Screencast”
      - now you see the url to the mp4 file on amazonaws in firebug

      have fun :-)