I don’t do much with bash since I primarily do windows admin, but I run into the same issue with powershell.
I have a document in VSCode that I store frequently used commands and any kind of notation/documentation I need to take advantage of it in the future. It’s a lot of one or two liners for stuff I know I’m going to forget, like the once a month hyperv cluster update command 😂.
Similarly I’ve added functions to the powershell local and global profiles on my computer/group policy. (contextually similar to bashrc, bash_profile, that load when launching interactive or non interactive shells, as well as user context) That way i can easily execute repeptive commands without having to think!
Basically, I think we all have the same problem and we’ve forgotten more than we know lol
I usually lean on fish autocomplete to remember things for me. Should I write stuff down? Yes. But I’m lazy, so this method is okay. Until I’m on a different machine and end up completely lost.
I’m using Fish, rather than Bash, and it has type-ahead suggestions, which help a lot.
So, I’ll type rsync and then it’ll show inline that I typed rsync -ah --info=progress2 a long time ago. And then I’ll be like, oh wow, this past-me-guy was very smart, I’ll be having the same.
Obviously, this is an imperfect system. If you run another rsync command without these flags, it won’t directly show these flags next time, because it’s not the most recent entry in history.
But it’s rare that I know I’ll want to run a command again in a few months, so it’s still really helpful.
And of course, there is nothing stopping me from creating aliases and scripts as well.
I use nushell, same thing with the suggestions. With nushell, you can also press up/down to traverse through the command history for commands starting with what you typed. For example, you could type ls and press up a bunch to go through ls | where size > 2kb, ls | where type == ‘directory’, etc (if you’ve executed those before).
Same with fish. It actually shows anything if you just put in one part of the command, so you don’t need to specify the exact starting command (in case you might not remember).
Example (which I use regularly):
install, then up (and up and up, and so on), and I see everything I’ve ever used that has install somewhere in it.
So I’ll get results ranging from sudo apt install foo to sudo nala install foo to flatpak install foo.
It’s a mix of some aliases from across several distros, some from as far back as 4DOS and a part for Cygwin, a somewhat complex prompt colorizer that highlights remote/local and root/user shells, and some other stuff that’s piled up over the years.
I want to like Joplin and considered using it, but I don’t like the electron base it is. And then converting my existing KB to a new format yet again… ugh.
I’ve found Joplin to be “acceptable” to share notes from mobile. When sharing through a shared drive, it saves each note as a separate markdown file, so it technically is greppable plain text, my only gripe is it puts all the files in a single dir. I think it can also import them, or you could add notes directly to the dir.
Over time, I’ve migrated most of my KB to some sort of markdown: Zim Wiki, DokuWiki, Joplin.
I still have some locked up in MediaWiki dumps, probably should spin one up and migrate it all.
I make a bash script for the whole process and document everything in Zim Wiki. I would only make an alias if I want to supply options to an existing command. Just how I do it.
Yeah I have actual notes and processes in my personal wiki too. I don’t like having to look up that one command that I only ever rarely use, like the I need to know if this webpage is serving a 200 or not… what did I do last time??
Zim is a desktop Wiki so no serving issues. The other thing I do is just list my script directory or grep it. If I know I have a script I can often find it that way.
My guess, based on Proprietary Codebases I Have Seen and the apparent general philosophy of Windows development, is that people would react to the now-open-sourced Windows code with either hilarity or horror (or both at once). There would be critical articles in the tech press. Then a small select group would mine it for low-level interoperability, but none of the code itself would be retained. Emulation layers such as WINE would end up being able to reproduce Windows’ quirks more thoroughly, but finding the important bits in a mess of Someone Else’s Code would slow down development as much as having an exemplar would speed it up. This all assumes that the code was released with an acceptable license.
On the Linux side, mostly a wash beyond some small interoperability gains, in other words. What would happen on the Windows side, I wouldn’t venture a guess on.
Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
I love that Linux is everything that Microsoft is not. I love that I have full control of my hardware. I have control over processes. I have control over packages. And user control is the default.
I can already join a Linux PC to a domain and run VPN. I can easily transfer files. I’m good.
Microsoft has historically not been friendly to anyone else. Until they prove otherwise, this is going to be my assumption. It’s some form of embrace/extend/extinguish.
That’s a good point. I feel like there would be a lot of suspicion or skepticism behind it
Open source Windows is an interesting premise, but Windows-focused Linux is already a thing going on. Not only has Microsoft basically adopted Ubuntu, but most of their recent projects have been open source. They are actually one of the most numerous contributors to the Linux kernel and it’s mostly to make Ubuntu run better on Azure hardware and to make Windows Subsystem for Linux more effective.
FWIW, my (non tech-savvy) mum and dad have been running Zorin for years (and Xubuntu prior to that), without any issues. The only times I’ve had to intervene is for doing an OS upgrade, which was a manual process, but Zorin now includes a GUI upgrader which should make things even more easier.
Folks who claim Linux is too unstable or complicated for home users, and think you need to use the commandline for every small thing, should check out Zorin (or talk to my mum and dad!).
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