Aliases are those badass secret identities and mysteries that developers type into their terminal to perform a task faster and make their workflow simpler. For the longest time, I procrastinated creating aliases because the thought of learning how to do it seemed really hard. But actually, it's extremely easy. And its made my life SO MUCH better, so I wanted to share how to do it.
Creating Aliases for Zsh Shell
- Go to your terminal
- Type in the command
cd ~
To make sure you are at your root directory,
- Then type in
open .zshrc
to open up your .zshrc folder. You should see a screen like this:
- Scroll down to where it says something like # alias ohmyzsh="mate ~/.oh-my-zsh"
- After the hashes, type in your own alias, i.e.:
alias cmsg="git commit -m"
Every time I want to run git commit -m, I can now use cmsg to do that task.
- Next
Cmd + Sto Save. Close the window. - THEN for the changes to take affect, you will have to enter the following in your terminal:
source .zshrc
Example Aliases
Alias names can often be hard to come up with for beginners—I know it was for me until I saw a senior engineer using some of them—so some examples would be:
alias project:start="yarn"
alias project:build="yarn project build"
alias project:test="yarn test"
alias project:start="yarn && yarn project build"
alias project="/application/documents/project/project-file"
Voilà You can now use your alias to perform the task you want faster.
If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on Twitter !
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