Individualize the Bash

You can edit you personal settings of the Bash in one of two files (depending on your system) within your home-directory. The .bashrc or the .bash_profile. The leading dot means the files are hidden. To show hidden files, you to tell ls to show all files:

cd ~
ls -a

The first line changes into your home-directory (in most cases you can also just type cd). The second line shows all files, including hidden ones.

You can edit the Bash-profile-file in every texteditor you like.

Alias

An alias is a kind of shortcut. With an alias you can create your own bash-commands. Let's start with a simple example: Imagine you want to show all files in a directory as a list over and over. You would then enter the following:

ls -lah

ls to list, -l to get a detailed list, -a to also show hidden files, -h to show the information in a human readable format. Of course you could enter this command alle the time, but also could create an alias.

You are free to add you alias-definition anywhere in the bash-profile-file. I prefer to add them on top. So, let's create our alias by adding the following line:

alias ll='ls -lah'

That's it. We just created the alias ll which will execute our special ls-command we used above.

Don't worry, if you saved your bash-profile but the alias isn't working. The .bashrc or the .bash_profile are only parsed once when your login-session is initialized. So you have to quit your terminal-application and start it again or, if you are working directly on the console, you have to logout an -in again.

Hint I don't know if this works on every system, but you may also use the reset command to initalize a new session.

You can now add as many alias-definitions as you like. Everything you can do in the bash can be an alias. But watch out! Avoid using alias-names which may already be bash-commands to avoid trouble.

Git-alias

By the way. If you are working git a lot in your terminal, you can define special git-alias, too! You can [read here][4], how it works and what to do.

Individualize the bash-prompt

You can upgrade your bash-prompt with a lot of usefull information. I prefer a minimalistic approach. Especially on my desktop-computer. I am always logged in a the same user and I don't need the hostname to be shown all the time. So I modified my bash-prompt to look like so:

It only shows the current directory I am in. Let's change the directory to make it a bit more visual:

I am in the directory _PROJECTS. As you can see only the current directory is shown not the whole path. That's because I want my prompt to be as short as possible.
Because I am working a lot with git, I extended the prompt to show the actual branch as soon as I am in a git repository:

You can individualize you prompt, by adding (in my case) the following line to the bottom of you bash-profile-file:

PS1="\[\033[1;33m\]\W\[\033[0m\] \[\033[1;32m\]\[\$(git_prompt_info)\]\[\033[0m\]$ "

To get the git-part up and running, you need to add a special function¹ to your bash-profile. Btw. there is a nice webtool to create your own prompt².

Search your bash-history

If you want to look for already used commands you can easily do so by hitting ctrl+R and start typing the command. You will then get suggestions based on already used commands. If you like the search through the history chronologically you can use this snippet³.

More ideas?

You have some more ideas or hints on how to make your bash-life more comfortable? Post a comment or ping me on twitter⁴.