Hi 43f folks,

I come to you with a bit of a question, a bit of a show and tell.

I’ve been hearing since I made the mac switch like 4 years ago that OS X was the best thing since sliced bread, because “look dude, there’s the command line if you ever need it.”

Sigh.

And then I never heard about the command-line except by people who are all about telling me that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Well, I’ve dug a little bit, and I’ve made some progress I know how to get around, and after a few months of really trying pretty hard, I’m almost borderline competent.

So I wanted to post a few links to things that I’ve found useful and a bit of the relevant parts of my .bash_profile and see what you all have to say and what cool things you’re doing with your .bash_profiles.

Things I find really helpful:

• MacPorts. I initially used fink a lot, and I still do a little bit, but I find the stuff on mac ports to be a bit more up to date and useful. Happy about that.
• Cmd-R to run bash commands from inside of text mate.
• wcalc for calculator
• blacktree’s visor.
• Geektool to display files on the desktop, you all probably know that one.

I’m going to copy and paste the relevant part of my bash_profile so you can all see, comment and add to what I have. Though frankly most of what’s there are alias’s for common directory changes, and subversion commands.

alias instiki='ruby /instiki/instiki'

alias td='mate .tasks'
alias tdo='mate /pathto/.tasks'
alias btd='mate /pathto/other/.tasks'

# Directory Changes
alias text='cd /pathto/mainproject'
alias output='cd /pathto/output'
alias webhost='cd /pathto/webhost'
alias blog='cd /pathto/blogfiles'
alias project='cd /pathto/project'
alias project='cd /pathto/project'
alias project='cd /pathto/project'

# things for subversion
alias sm='svn move'
alias sa='svn add'
alias sd='svn delete'
alias sr='svn rename'
alias sc='svn commit'
alias ss='svn status'

alias ssync='svnsync sync path://tobackup/svn'
alias ssyncr='svn pdel --revprop -r 0 svn:sync-lock path://tobackup/svn'

# Makes Visor behave 
resetvisor() {                                                                        
  defaults write com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal -dict-add Rows 15                 
  ~/.visor &                                                                        
  killall Terminal                                                                  
}

A word about my organization/files. I have a bunch of folders in my documents folder (which are all synced to a local subversion repo that I sync up regularly with an offsite repo. I have two to three .tasks files, which contain todo lists, though there are sometimes other folders that have a tasks file if the project contained within needs specific planning. Most everything is in the main .tasks file though, so there isn’t really a system breakdown there.

I feel like I could be doing more, or that I’m being really assbackwards about the whole thing. If you have anything to comment, I know this isn’t dotfiles.org, but I think this is (or can be) as much about strategy as it is about what’s in the .bash_profile