Console Habits

Some time ago, Duck wrote a very small shell script to check our console habits. Here is my current version, after some modifications. It uses history from zsh, so you might need to change it if you’re using bash (with contributions from Bruno Maioli and Serge Gebhardt):

alias habits='\history -500 -1 | sed "s/^[[:space:]]*[0-9]*[[:space:]]*//" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r | head -n 10'

This allows me to check what sorts of commands I usually type. I use this idea to find ways to make my programming environment more efficient. This is my current habits output:

 174 g s
  37 g a .
  21 g push
  21 g c
  14 guard
  14 g push heroku master
  11 r s
  11 g d
   9 vim
   6 g a -u .

This list of commands is very optimised. g is just an alias for git, and most git commands I use are also aliased on my global config. r s (rails server), guard and vim are called automatically by tmuxinator when I want to switch projects.

Every time I check this output I learn something new about my habits. This time, I’m observing how much git is an integral part of my workflow, and how much time I spend checking statuses and diffs. It hints me to the need of some sort of visual representation of my working tree, but I still don’t know what to do about that.

What I want to do for the next alias version is to filter out git commands. They will be there anyway, so I might as well consider them ‘pretty optimised’ and move on to the next set. I suspect a bunch of rake related stuff will come up.