Pimp that Terminal - Add shortcuts and functions to your .bash_profile to simplify routine tasks

Key Takeaways

what if you could automate routine things that you do in the terminal every day like switch to a very long and complex folder path that you normally have to go CD space CD space um or maybe open a file or a folder directly in Sublime Text today we learn in this very quick video how to do that it will only apply to Mac and Linux and Unix users uh it will not apply to WN to Windows users I'm sorry there are ways to do it but that's just it's completely different from this video so what you're going to do is you're going to go to Sublime text or your favorite text editor and you're going to open a new document and we're going to save what's called The Bash profile folder I can't type and talk at the same time if you guys wonder why I do that okay so the file in your user directory called bash profile is the file we're going to update and what that is is that runs every time you open a new terminal session so let's go ahead and make an alias and Alias just is a shortcut basically for a command Alias let's go n now I'll just make it super simple I'll just call it engine X for an engine X project that I'm working on if I go engine X then the command then I basically do quotes and anything in the quotes is the actual command it runs when I type engine X so I'm going to go code sandbox engine X engine so that's a long folder name that I hate typing I'm always having to type it and I'm going to echo which will tell me this will basically just Echo whatever I put in here and this is just my reference to remember that I have this command okay let me go ahead and hit save I'm going to go to my user folder bash profile there we go it warns me that dot is only for system files and then I'm going to replace it and I say yep okay so now if I create a new terminal session you'll notice that it echoes this that's why I type the echo here so whenever I open a new window of any kind I'm always going to Echo that and so now I can just type engine X there we go and automatically took me all the way up to my engine X folder which is my usercode sandbox /in x/g X awesome let's here's another very useful one and that's I call it sub which is for Sublime Text um I'm going to go open this is actually a function A bash function looks like JavaScript in a lot of ways number one or dollar one is my first argument that I pass it I'll show you in a second how to use that and then- a is my application names and I'm going to go Sublime text so there we go and then I'm going to Echo my you know REM reminder open file in Sublime there we go let's save that and let's go ahead and now I have to open a new session always have to open a new terminal for these things to activate just so you know if I type sub here nothing happens says command not found I open a new terminal window and I'm going to be fine so now I can go let me see what I got here I can go sub music and voila it opened the music folder as if it were a project in Sublime Text super cool let me go to my engine X folder now and let me see what I got let me go sub vagrant file nice so now I can easily open a file I can easily open a project if you want to open the folder you're in you just do Dot and there you go now I got my whole engine x file and that's a super fun little trick that lots of people don't know about that you allows you to automate a lot of things in terminal create your own shortcuts and generally enjoy life more have a great day