My favourite zsh/bash shortcuts (functions and aliases)

A developer shared their favorite zsh/bash shortcuts, including functions and aliases for Git operations, file management, and image conversion. The shortcuts, many AI-generated, aim to save time on frequent tasks like branching, cherry-picking, and creating directories.

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 uploading. 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.