

Console productivity hack: Discover the frequent; then make it the easy - ecounysis
http://matt.might.net/articles/console-hacks-exploiting-frequency/

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bediger
The money quote (of the analytical section):

 _Yet, research in human-computer interaction barely acknowledges the command
line's existence. It's a strange omission, since the core principles of human
factors engineering still apply to the console._

Why is this? I've also noticed a corollary, that interface testing for
"experts" doesn't really use expert testing. One paper I've read (name eludes
me) about text editor usability had the nominal "expert" users ignoring
regular expression searching, and just scrolling about randomly for the
assigned phrase.

Either truly "expert" users are so few and far between that researchers can't
find them, or the researchers can't tell who qualifies as an "expert" and who
doesn't.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Or, most text files are small.

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tmhedberg
I highly recommend autojump[1] as a simple way to jump to commonly-used
working directories. It's saved me a lot of repetitive typing since I
discovered it.

[1] <https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump>

~~~
mattmight
Thanks for the pointer!

I've updated the post with this and several other simplifications sent in by
readers.

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rcfox
(I have a feeling that) my frequently used commands change depending on what
I'm doing, and with time. Instead of trying to alias my current favourite
commands, I tend to just use the backwards history search built in to my
shell, and access it with Ctrl-R. I can type the beginning of the command and
have the rest of it completed for me.

The only thing that would make it better is Ido-style completion.

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mdonahoe
I feel validated , since I recently wrote some aliases that quickly switch me
to my frequently used directories.

Logging to a database is an excellent idea.

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GICodeWarrior
No real need for a Perl script here.

    
    
        alias frequency='sort | uniq -c'
    

Also, this should probably use exec.

    
    
        system(". cdto '@row'") ;
        exit ;
    

Otherwise, you are needlessly keeping Perl on your stack.

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alexyoung
I use cdargs (<http://www.skamphausen.de/cgi-bin/ska/CDargs>) for
"bookmarking" commonly accessed directories. It doesn't automatically add
entries though.

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vdm
keyfreq does this in emacs.

[http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/source/browse/trunk/packa...](http://code.google.com/p/ergoemacs/source/browse/trunk/packages/keyfreq.el)

