I would probably disagree with this advice, certainly for anyone who uses more than one machine. Setting up lots of specific aliases means you’re learning a unique system, and all your muscle memory becomes useless every time you’re in a container or SSHing somewhere without your tweaks.
I’d rather optimize for the 99% case, which is me getting shit done on my machine, than refuse to use convenient stuff for the sake of maybe not forgetting a command I can perfectly just look up if I do legitimately happen to forget about it. If I’m on a remote, I already don’t have access to all my usual software anyway, what’s a couple more aliases? To me this sounds like purposefully deciding to slow yourself down cutting paper with a knife all the time cause you may not have access to scissors when you happen to sit at someone else’s desk.
Different use cases, innit? I have several personal machines, a work machine, and infinite containers and VMs to deal with so it’s not worth it for me. If you’re always on the same machine and can easily take your config with you to the next one then more power to you!
I do connect to VMs and containers all the time, I just don’t see a reason not to speed myself up on my own machines because of it. To me, the downside of typing an alias on a machine that doesn’t have it once in a while, is much less than having to type everything out or searching my shell history for longer commands every single time. My shell configs are in a dotfiles repo I can clone to new personal/work machines easily, and I have an alias to rsync some key parts to VMs if needed. Containers, I just always assume I don’t have access to anything but builtins. I guess if you don’t do the majority of your work on a local shell, it may indeed not be worth it.
With some configuration management tools like ansible you don’t even need root privs to manage your users environment and keep everything neat and consistent.
Working in tech I seriously curtailed customization on my machine to only what I really wanted and this was because I would so often have to deal with defaults or other peoples customization’s.
I would probably disagree with this advice, certainly for anyone who uses more than one machine. Setting up lots of specific aliases means you’re learning a unique system, and all your muscle memory becomes useless every time you’re in a container or SSHing somewhere without your tweaks.
I’d rather optimize for the 99% case, which is me getting shit done on my machine, than refuse to use convenient stuff for the sake of maybe not forgetting a command I can perfectly just look up if I do legitimately happen to forget about it. If I’m on a remote, I already don’t have access to all my usual software anyway, what’s a couple more aliases? To me this sounds like purposefully deciding to slow yourself down cutting paper with a knife all the time cause you may not have access to scissors when you happen to sit at someone else’s desk.
Different use cases, innit? I have several personal machines, a work machine, and infinite containers and VMs to deal with so it’s not worth it for me. If you’re always on the same machine and can easily take your config with you to the next one then more power to you!
I do connect to VMs and containers all the time, I just don’t see a reason not to speed myself up on my own machines because of it. To me, the downside of typing an alias on a machine that doesn’t have it once in a while, is much less than having to type everything out or searching my shell history for longer commands every single time. My shell configs are in a dotfiles repo I can clone to new personal/work machines easily, and I have an alias to rsync some key parts to VMs if needed. Containers, I just always assume I don’t have access to anything but builtins. I guess if you don’t do the majority of your work on a local shell, it may indeed not be worth it.
Configuration Management tools? In which scenario do you SSH into machines where you don’t have root privs and still need elaborate shell commands?
With some configuration management tools like ansible you don’t even need root privs to manage your users environment and keep everything neat and consistent.
Yes I am stupid and thought the link is describing some apps which additionally need to be installed but its mostly config and aliases…
Working in tech I seriously curtailed customization on my machine to only what I really wanted and this was because I would so often have to deal with defaults or other peoples customization’s.