markjgsmith

Cold and drizzly rain day today where I am. Ankle still hurting quite a lot, so I'm trying to keep that leg rested and perched up on a cushion. All the new blogging scripts, bash aliases and of course the laptop, are making writing much more enjoyable. #

Start with aliases and scripts

It's always amazing to me how far you can get with just bash scripts and bash aliases on a unix/linux based system.

I often find when I'm configuring a new environment that it's a great place to start. As you go about your workflow of whatever activity you are trying to accomplish, you start adding small repeatable commands into aliases, which speeds up whatever you are doing, eventually moving more complicated things into a few small scripts, which you then of course trigger using some more aliases. With enough thought you can optimise it so that with just a few key strokes, you can achieve what used to take tens of minutes maybe even hours in seconds.

That's what I have been finding setting up my new laptop with a basic blogging environment. I can now tap a few keys and all the necessary markdown files get automatically created, in the right place, with any needed folders created too, and the frontmatter in the markdown files has the meta data inserted. That used to all be manually done, which not only is time consuming but very error prone. I've also got some aliases that automatcally create a new feature branch in my Github repo at the start of every day, and it automatically gets merged at midnight. What's even cooler is that by using bash heredocs in my blogging script, I can copy and paste urls, post titles and body text into environment variables placed on the same line when executing the alias and all that data gets inserted into the frontmatter, with nice defaults if I don't set them.

I can also navigate directly to important folders on the file system by typing single letter aliases, which are clever enough to know where in the filesystem you wan to go based on the current date.

It's really amazing what features are available in the standard operating system if you use the command line. All these features have been tried and tested for multiple decades by programmers all over the world.

Of course most regular non programmer people will never use such a setup, but when you have your workflow working smoothly, it can act as a sort of prototype for a possible web based tool, which other regular normies could use. #