Improving productivity with shell scripts and zsh aliases

January 1, 2021

Is this guide for you?

Are you a terminal user looking to boost your productivity?

Are you often working on different projects and need to close and reopen them multiple times a day?

Do you have to use search engines to check for the same commands again and again?

Are your projects all over your computer and you don't always remember where the files are located?

I lost so much time with this, but think that I now have found the perfect solution: shell scripts + zsh aliases.

Prerequisites

First Step - write a shell script to replace the manual typing of all single commands

Create a directory where you store all your scripts

Example: /scripts

Create a .sh file

Example: runBlog.sh

Make the file executable by typing chmod +x nameOfYourFile.sh in your terminal

Example: chmod +x runBlog.sh

Open the file in your code editor

Type all single commands in the same order you would normally do via terminal

Following example is why I started to do this. It will:

- stop all running Docker containers
- navigate to the project I want to open
- opens the project in VSCode
- starts the Docker containers of that project

#!/bin/bash
docker stop $(docker ps -aq)
cd /Users/example/development/2020/blog
code .
docker-compose up -d

Try to execute the script by navigating to your scripts folder and typing ./nameOfYourFile.sh

Second step - create an alias to use this script

Instead of navigating to your scripts folder and execute it from there, or typing the absolute path, you can create a shortcut in ZSH.

Open your zsh config with an editor

Example with nano:

nano .zshrc

Go down until you find the aliases section and add your custom alias. alias nameOfYourChoice="absolutePathToYourScript"

Example:

alias runBlog="/Users/example/scripts/runBlog.sh"

Close and save the config

Reload the config with following command

source .zshrc

Try it out

If you now type the name you have given to your alias, the corresponding script should run.

Example:

runBlog

You can always check all the available aliases by typing alias in your terminal

That's it. Hope this was helpful and that you will save some time in the future.