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Suffix aliases (-s) in Zsh

Published at
    Jul 05 2022
Updated at
    Jul 05 2022
Reading time
    2min

This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all
my web development learnings.

I like geeking out on my local shell setup, and my dotfiles hold a
few aliases I can't live without - ll, ni, nr and all these other
two-character commands are deeply engrained in my muscle memory.

To define an alias, you set a new command name and map it to another
command.

alias ll='exa -la --git --icons'

Today I learned that the alias command in Zsh also supports a -s flag
which enables suffix aliases. As a result, this is a valid alias in
Zsh:

# "Run" the file to look at its content
# $ index.html
# -> cat index.html
alias -s html=cat

You can "just run files" with a suffix alias without defining a
command or making it an executable. After defining the alias above,
executing index.html on your terminal will be expanded and shuffled
to cat index.html. 

If you want to learn more about suffix aliases, access its manual via
man zshbuiltins on the command line.

But there's more! You can define a suffix alias for multiple file
types, too. I added cat (aliased to bat on my machine) as the
standard handling of the following file formats.

# "Run" the file to look at its content
# $ ./readme.md
# -> cat ./readme.md
alias -s {js,json,env,md,html,css,toml}=cat

I'm super into this shorter way of looking into text files quickly.

Example showing a the execution of the file "sort-by" which results
in the display of its content.

This functionality is pretty neat already, but there's more (even
though it might be a bit of a hack). @_smhmd pointed out that they
use suffix aliases to save typing git clone when cloning a git
repository. They paste the repo SSH link into the terminal, and it's
expanded to a proper clone command. Smart! 

# "Run" ssh links to clone repos
# $ git@github.com:stefanjudis/dotfiles.git
# -> git clone git@github.com:stefanjudis/dotfiles.git
alias -s git="git clone"

Running a SSH link on the terminal which results in cloning of this
repo

Do you know of more suffix alias use cases? If so, I'd love to hear
them via email or on Twitter!

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