Hello friend! This is a newsletter for builders.

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I hope the ideas in this week’s newsletter can help you get it done.

In this weeks newsletter

• 💻 Trick: Bash alias for git

• 📜 Quote of the week

Trick: Bash alias for git

After years of using git and thousands of commits later - I have finally done a thing.

At first I avoided this thing - because I wanted to learn the commands.

Then I avoided this thing more - because I liked typing the commands.

But now I have done the thing - and it makes me happy.

Alex Galea @agalea91

Added these lines to my ~/.bash_profile today. Long time coming alias gits='git status' alias gita='git add -u' gitm() { git commit -m "$1" } alias gitp='git push'

February 21st 2021

2 Likes

Since I’m on Mac, I edited my ~/.bash_profile. On Linux you would probably want to edit ~/.bashrc. On Windows.. god help you 😛

Here are the lines I added (you can open the tweet above to copy the text for yourself):

After adding them, make sure to update your environment (this is automatically done when opening a new shell).

source ~/.bash_profile

These work as you would expect, e.g. on my ”scrapy-crawlers” project:

scrapy-crawlers git:(master) ✗ gits
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Changes not staged for commit:
...

scrapy-crawlers git:(master) ✗ gita 

scrapy-crawlers git:(master) ✗ gitm "Add super important thing"
[master 172f023] Add super important thing
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

scrapy-crawlers git:(master) ✗ gitp 
Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 330 bytes | 330.00 KiB/s, done.
...

Quote of the week

“What would this look like if it were easy?”
- Tim Ferris

This seemed appropriate this week because I’ve been consuming many things by Tim Ferris recently, such as Tools of Titans (the book) - which is amazing.

I think this quote is most useful not even for motivational reasons (although it’s open enough that you could probably take it that way) but for practical reasons. i.e. getting shit done!

The idea is to think about the easy way as a means of removing the hard parts. In other words, being able to accomplish the things you want by taking away complexities that would (sooner or later) prevent the thing from being done altogether.

Say I want to learn French.

Here’s a few reasons it’s hard
- Massive time commitment.
- There’s so many words to know.
- I have to learn how to pronounce the words AND spell them properly.

But what about if it were easy? In that case, I would:
- Invest only a short amount of time a day, but be highly focussed during that time.
- Learn only the most commonly used words, and ignore the long tail for now.
- Don’t lean to spell anything yet.

And just like that - I’ve laid out the framework for an easy route to start learning French.

-Alex

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