My zsh profile is over 1000 lines at this point. A lot of that is functions I asked AI to generate for me, since it's fast, portable, and saves me a ton of typing.
Here's the thing though: the shortcuts that save me the most time aren't the clever ones. They're the dumb ones. Things like clone
instead of git clone && cd
, or dir
instead of mkdir -p && cd
. Each one only saves a second or two, but I run them so often that it adds up fast.
These are in no particular order, just the ones I reach for constantly.
A few one-liners I have set up as plain aliases:
alias gcp="git cherry-pick"
alias git-append="git commit --amend --no-edit -a"
gcp
is self-explanatory. git-append
amends the last commit with your currently staged (and unstaged, thanks to -a
) changes without touching the commit message. Great for fixing up a commit you just made before you push.
One of my most-used functions. Normally you have to remember whether a branch exists before deciding between git checkout <branch>
and git checkout -b <branch>
. This just does the right thing either way:
gb() {
if git rev-parse --verify --quiet "$1" >/dev/null; then
git checkout "$1"
else
git checkout -b "$1"
fi
}
When an experiment goes sideways or I just want to throw everything away and start clean, I run nah
:
nah() {
git reset --hard
git clean -df
if [ -d ".git/rebase-apply" ] || [ -d ".git/rebase-merge" ]; then
git rebase --abort
fi
}
This resets tracked changes, removes untracked files and directories. No confirmation prompt, so use it carefully.
Useful when you need to cherry-pick a batch of commits from one branch onto another in order:
logs() {
if [[ -z "$1" || "$1" =~ [^0-9] ]]; then
echo "Usage: logs <number_of_commits>"
return 1
fi
git log -n "$1" --reverse --pretty=format:"gcp %h"
}
Run logs 5
and you get the last 5 commits printed oldest to newest, each one already formatted as gcp <hash>
(using the alias from above). Copy, paste, done.
This is the one I mentioned that barely saves any time per use, but I run it constantlyn and the time save compounds:
dir() { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"; }
I got tired of hitting "No such file or directory" errors from mkdir
when the parent folder didn't exist yet, so I just overrode the default behavior globally:
mkdir() {
command mkdir -p "$@"
}
Now mkdir
always behaves like mkdir -p
.
Same idea as the mkdir
override, but for opening a file in nano
when the folder it lives in doesn't exist yet:
nano() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
command nano
else
dir=$(dirname "$1")
if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then
mkdir -p "$dir"
fi
command nano "$@"
fi
}
Instead of overwriting a file and losing the original, replace
moves it to ~/.Trash
first and then opens a fresh file with the same name in nano
:
replace() {
if [[ $# -ne 1 ]]; then
echo "Usage: replace <file>" >&2
return 1
fi
local file="$1"
if [[ ! -f "$file" ]]; then
echo "Error: '$file' not found or not a file" >&2
return 1
fi
mkdir -p ~/.Trash
mv "$file" ~/.Trash/
nano "$file"
}
But mainly this saves me from runing "rm && nano " which I often do when replacing a file from an AI chat or similar. If you need the original back, it's sitting in ~/.Trash
.
iPhone photos default to HEIC, which isn't great for sharing or up. These two functions batch-convert them using ImageMagick:
heic2jpg() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: heic2jpg file1.heic [file2.heic ...]"
return 1
fi
for f in "$@"; do
if [ ! -f "$f" ]; then echo "Not found: $f"; continue; fi
magick "$f" "${f%.*}.jpg"
done
}
heic2png() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: heic2png file1.heic [file2.heic ...]"
return 1
fi
for f in "$@"; do
if [ ! -f "$f" ]; then echo "Not found: $f"; continue; fi
magick "$f" "${f%.*}.png"
done
}
Both take any number of files, so heic2jpg *.heic
works fine.
For getting images web-ready, this wraps img2webp
with sensible defaults and skips anything that isn't actually a file:
img2webp() {
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
echo "Usage: img2webp <file.png> [file2.png ...] or img2webp *.png"
return 1
fi
for input in "$@"; do
if [[ ! -f "$input" ]]; then
echo "Skipping: '$input' is not a file"
continue
fi
local output="${input%.*}.webp"
echo "Converting: $input → $output"
command img2webp -lossy -q 80 "$input" -o "$output"
done
}
Runs at quality 80, lossy, which is a good default for most web use cases. Saves a TON of storage space and bandwidth
Small ones I use daily without thinking about them:
alias pest="./vendor/bin/pest"
alias python="python3" # For AI commands expecting it
alias py="python3" # For me when I'm lazy
The pest
alias saves typing out the full vendor binary path every time I want to run tests. The python
/py
aliases exist because plenty of AI-generated commands assume python
points to Python 3, and half the time I'm too lazy to type the 3
myself anyway.
None of these are groundbreaking on their own. But that's kind of the point: the small, boring shortcuts you run 50 times a day save you more time overall than the clever ones you run once a week. If you're not already keeping a running file of these for yourself, start one. Every time you catch yourself typing the same thing twice, that's a candidate.