Aka

AKA is an alias manager. keep tabs on all of your alias'ed commands, shortcuts, and more without hand-editing dot files.

If you work on the command line a lot you know there are commands that get really tedious to type out over and over again. for decades command line pros have been adding aliases to their shell to alleviate this problem. Simply add a line like alias proj="cd /path/to/current/project" to your .profile file and the next time you log in you can do this:

$ proj

instead of this:

$ cd /path/to/current/project

And you've just saved yourself 22 characters' worth of typing.

But what if you really don't want to edit your profile files every time you want to add or remove one of these aliases? Well, you can just move all the alias definitions into a file named, say ~./alias and then you just add one line to .profile:

source ~/.alias

And now you can just edit the .alias file.

Or you can use aka.

$ gem install aka

1. Add the line source ~/.alias to your .bash_profile or .profile or .zshrc… basically whatever profile file you use on your system.
2. Run aka -a hi "echo Hi There!"
3. Type source ~/.alias to reload the aliases in your current session (or restart your session)
4. Type hi
   1. Enjoy having your command line say hi there back to you.
5. Run aka -h to see a full list of features.
6. Decide that you want to create a useful alias now.
7. Run aka -a aload "source ~/.alias".
8. Manually reload your alias file for the last time by typing source ~/.alias at the command prompt.
9. From now on, whenever you make changes to the alias file you can simply type aload at the command prompt and your new aliases will be ready for you.

Quick note: Mostly for my own peace of mind, running aka -d creates a backup copy of your alias file as .alias.bak before cleaning out your current alias file. So if you really want to get rid of any sign of your aliases you'll need to manually delete that file as well.

Pull requests and issues are very welcome. If you have time, please include a solution or a test with any issues you submit.

##Acknowledgements

Many, many thanks go to David Copeland for the Methadone framework that made this app possible and his book which made it easy.

I really like this app, but I've got other things I want to work on. But there are a few features I'm still planning to add:

1. Support for a config file that will let you use a file other than ~/.alias for your aliases. - DONE!
2. Grouping aliases
   1. Aliases sorted alphabetically by default. - DONE!