Automating Daily Tasks

Tuesday. March 07, 2017 - 1 min

Summary:

One way to speed up daily routines, or at least make it fun: making command-line shortcuts with aliases.

Inspired by:

• Edmond Lau’s book The Effective Engineer, which I just started reading and got me started thinking about how I could make daily tasks quicker
• Seema Ullal’s presentation at Hackbright on Git, especially the portion of her talk on setting up our terminals–this is an article she referenced

How I made my aliases

1. open ~/.bash_profile with your text editor
2. in the file, type alias [name]='[whatever command you want to be shortened]'
3. From this page, I found that you can just use the application name with 'open' -a and a link to whatever you want the application to open. This works with opening Spotify with a Spotify URL, such as that of a playlist! Examples:

alias mcs='open -a "Google Chrome" https://www.youtube.com/user/mycodeschool/playlists'

alias mov_sc='open -a "Spotify" https://open.spotify.com/user/jmichellekim/playlist/5I12pB2PExI0YNbU2tEbhd'

Save bash_profile and try it out:

1. Reload or open a new tab in terminal
2. Type just the alias and return

Applications

• Email
• Going to a YouTube playlist you frequent
• Playing your favorite Spotify playlist quickly

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Michelle Kim

Full Stack and Test Automation Engineer

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