Small programming tricks (will-keleher.com)

  #if 0
    // Normal path
  #else
    // Debug path
  #endif

It's not even that bad of a habit with zsh either where it will only scroll through history matching a substring in your history, for instance if I type "rg -i" and then start pressing up arrow, it will only cycle through history entries starting with "rg -i".

People had this same problem last century. They would use templates that fit over their keyboards with all the common shortcuts and commands printed on them. Sometimes they were for a specific program, but you could buy blank ones to write your own notes.

Today, "keyboard templates" have an entirely different meaning, so the best thing for this is paper. Print your shortcuts out on a piece of paper and put it near your monitor. You could even categorize them by writing them on different-colored Post-Its.

So if you want to use ctrl-r, but you’re using the up key, use the down key to navigate back to a clear line, then use ctrl-r. Do it enough times and your brain will work overtime to find a shortcut (aka just doing it the new way).

Is this just plain old rage baiting? I literally can’t tell any more.

Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.

There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.

--date=2026-09-16

--date 20260916

and all variations thereof. It's annoying enough to have to check which script expects what format that I probably should've wasted some time or tokens to align them all, or at least put it into an MD file. But it's just an illustration of how LLMs can make CLI commands more obscure than they need to be.

There's no amount of skill/efficiency/productivity a human worker can reach that will make employers give up on the dream of one day replacing them with software. The AI companies looking to profit from renting out the collected works and creativity of humanity certainly wouldn't shut down if the GDP tripled either.

People should still take time to learn how to use computers though. As long as they're going to use computers they can save themselves a lot of trouble and anxiety by investing some time in learning about them a little. Same with many other things people use and depend on.

  alias ..="cd .."
  alias ...="cd ../.."
  alias ....="cd ../../.."

  #!/bin/bash
  # SSH to remote system and change into same (current) directory
  DIR=$(pwd)
  ssh -t $1 "cd $DIR; bash -l -i"

I frequently do the same, but not everyday; only when i think its something actually useful/helpful beyond the everyday crap. Most recently, we have had a huge push to use ai (just like everywhere else), ive been getting pretty creative with it, and at this point have a well polished setup that i can give a shitty sentence on a problem, not only does it understand the task, but theres a full ticket->branch->work->pr review->ready comment flow that it uses. My team also uses ai but they havent quite wrapped their head on ways to really work with it. I have built and shared a number of helpful things with the team to try and help them grow. One such thing was a doc i had my ai instance write, based on how ive been using my setup. This alone has started to get the rest of the team up to where i am.

My team doesnt share the same types of things i do, but they still share helpful things.

Call it what you will; I think if youre not helping your team grow by providing insights and helpful things, then youre not the kind of person i want to work with.

Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.

I rarely type "cd" anymore. A huge quality of life improvement!

Still, Zsh history with fzf fuzzy searching is fantastic. I have years of history I can recall commands with a few keystrokes.

Truly a second-brain.

And as another commenter said, you often forget the target, and use Ctrl-r to find it. Although just does support fzf...

IMHO the value of these nuggets is that you understand what you're doing and why; opening yourself to large amounts of non-default behavior likely will end up in a less than pleasant setup.

Not taking into account that different users might disagree on what is convenient and what is not, which is basically the point of making things configurable.

You can just record and play back your exact keystrokes like a _Super Smash Melee_ game plays back your inputs to replay matches. If you can figure out how to do any mildly complex action once you can literally replay it a thousand times. Just like AutoHotKey! To my that's the essence of citizen programming!

Or stupid, like all those vloggers posting "ZOMG! Go all in with these secret hidden weird trick iPhone life hacks to level up!" that are just regurgitating what's in the manual.

As we used to say, RTFM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/iphone

I have always felt like my bar for publishing something (even just to internal wikis/channels) is too high due to being overly self-conscious. I think we should try not to validate that feeling by implying that there is a non-negligible number of readers who will think you have a personality flaw because you wrote down your personal collection of tips in a public place, or that those people deserve consideration in the first place.

There is no such thing as "the things everybody knows". There are just too many things. Even a list of basic tips is probably going to contain one thing I didn't know or perhaps forgot. Write-ups like this are where most of my practical knowledge comes from, not RTFM (which I do).

My "find" is almost always

    tree -if | grep "<whatever-pattern>$" | head -1

The tradeoff is needing to learn regex, which is not any easier to learn than find arguments.

similar to ripgrep, though, fd is a modern replacement that’s a bit friendlier to use.

And I don't think that's a good thing. Especially because AI coding agents use it a lot. They only need to hallucinate a little to destroy your filesystem.

It's essentially like the SQL SELECT expression.

  find -name '*.md' -and -not -type d

  find '(' -name '*.md' -and -not -type d ')' -or '(' [...] ')'

The most messed up part in my mind though is that while most things in find are clearly helping the expression towards its goal of "true" or "false" on whether to include the file or not in the results, some, like -prune or -exec do so but with side-effects. And since they're usually invoked primarily for their side-effect, it isn't immediately obvious that they even return a value, or are participating in the expression itself. (-prune is true, and -exec depends.) And this is where it becomes important that `find`'s -and & -or are short-circuiting, too. (In a purely logical expression, it wouldn't really matter except as an optimization.)

People also sometimes omit -and, which I'm not a huge fan of the legibility of. (But using -and makes it not POSIX; you can do -a but ew. which brings me to the last bit…)

macOS: the find there requires the starting-point arg; so my examples above, on macOS, would all need to be,

  find . [expression args...]

While I agree with globbing (or fd) for interactive use, I think for scripting I'd still say "you might want find"; there are limits to arg list lengths (see xargs) that (esp. recursive) globs can exceed; unless you know you'll never glob the world, find might be appropriate. Also:

  echo *nope*

Both rsync -avz /path/to/file user@server:/another/path/to/ or rsync -avz /path/to/file/ user@server:/another/path/to/file

Will create directory named /another/path/to/file which will contain all contents of the original directory (/path/to/file/*).

Basically, if you include the trailing slash in the source path, only contents of the directory will be copied (useful when you need to rename it).

    rsync -avz path/to/old_dir/ user@server:/path/to/new_dir

Ctrl-l to clear the screen, Ctrl-p to select previous command, Ctrl-j to enter it again. I don't even use Enter key when in terminal anymore.

When you want to pause entering a command for a moment do Ctrl-a to go to the start of the line, and type # to comment out. Then Ctrl-j. You can return to that later with Ctrl-p, then Ctrl-a again and Ctrl-d to remove that comment.

To edit complex commands you might want to use Alt-e to enter $EDITOR.