Abbreviations are better than aliases

Aliases are a way to shorten long or complicated commands or to easily add additional arguments when running commands.

Common aliases are gs for git status, a for artisan and dr for drush.

I've been experimenting with Zellij today and have written aliases like zl for zellij list-sessions, but have also added extra arguments such as zellij list-sessions | sort | grep -v EXITED to sort the sessions and filter any exited sessions.

Running these aliases means it's easier and quicker for me to run these commands.

The issue with aliases, I think, is that you can forget that the underlying commands are if you only type gs or zl.

It's also not easy when giving demos, pair programming for others to see and understand the commands that are being run.

Instead of aliases, I mostly use abbreviations that expand automatically after pressing the space key.

That way, I and others get to see and understand the commands being run.

Note: I originally saw this done by Sebastian Daschner and I originally used his ZSH expansion code, but now use zsh-abbr. There are settings for this in Nix/Home Manager.

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