What do you advice for shell usage?
- Do you use bash? If not, which one do you use? zsh, fish? Why do you do it?
- Do you write
or
? Do you write fish exclusive scripts?
- Do you have two folders, one for proven commands and one for experimental?
- Do you publish/ share those commands?
- Do you sync the folder between your server and your workstation?
- What should’ve people told you what to do/ use?
- good practice?
- general advice?
- is it bad practice to create a handful of commands like
podup
andpoddown
that replacepodman compose up -d
andpodman compose down
orpodlog
aspodman logs -f --tail 20 $1
orpodenter
forpodman exec -it "$1" /bin/sh
?
Background
I started bookmarking every somewhat useful website. Whenever I search for something for a second time, it’ll popup as the first search result. I often search for the same linux commands as well. When I moved to atomic Fedora, I had to search for rpm-ostree
(POV: it was a horrible command for me, as a new user, to remember) or sudo ostree admin pin 0
. Usually, I bookmark the website and can get back to it. One day, I started putting everything into a .bashrc
file. Sooner rather than later I discovered that I could simply add ~/bin
to my variable and put many useful scripts or commands into it.
For the most part I simply used bash. I knew that you could somehow extend it but I never did. Recently, I switched to fish because it has tab completion. It is awesome and I should’ve had completion years ago. This is a game changer for me.
I hated that bash would write the whole path and I was annoyed by it. I added PS1="$ "
to my ~/.bashrc
file. When I need to know the path, I simply type pwd
. Recently, I found starship which has themes and adds another line just for the path. It colorizes the output and highlights whenever I’m in a toolbox/distrobox. It is awesome.
Bash script for simple things (although Fish is my regular shell) and Node or Python scripts for complex things. Using
#!/usr/bin/env node
works just like it would for Bash so you know.This. I still write plenty of bash scripts, but I’ve noticed that except for really simple cases, I very quickly reach a point where I would have been better off using Python instead. And when I start with a Python scripts I often end up redoing it in Rust for a variety of reasons. It’s just easy to underestimate how serious a programming project is. At least I’ve never started something in bash that I needed to migrate to Rust.
(I think a lot of people would see Go as the next logical step from Python, but I personally find some things about Go really irritating.)