¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Ricardo Ander-Egg suggests to use executable scripts instead of shell aliases:

I stopped using shell aliases and moved everything into executable scripts.

I’ve been slowly doing the same. From his post, adapted:

Main Benefits:

• No need to source your shell rc after adding new scripts — Use immediately without reloading your shell
• No need to edit your shell rc, just drop executable files in $HOME/.bin (already in my $PATH) — Faster iteration (edit script, re-run command, repeat)
• Can be used out-of-the-box with fd / find / xargs and friends

Another recommendation:

Brandon Rhodes: Start all of your commands with a comma:

A quick experiment revealed in a flash that the comma was exactly the character that I had been looking for! Every tool and shell that lay in arm’s reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename. By simply prefixing each of my custom commands with a comma, they became completely distinct from system commands and thus free from any chance of a collision.

And, best of all, thanks to the magic of tab-completion, it became very easy to browse my entire collection of commands. When trying to remember which of my commands are available in my ~/bin/ directory on a given system, or when simply trying to remember what some of my commands are called, I simply type a comma followed by tab and my list of commands appears:

I heartily recommend this technique to anyone with their own ~/bin/ directory who wants their command names kept clean, tidy, and completely orthogonal to any commands that the future might bring to your system.

I used to do this with prefixes (t- because of my first name initial, and then sd-), but a non-alphabetic character is more compelling.