Dir Aliases with the Fish Shell

My memory is terrible. I usually have a hard time remembering long commands and their parameters. For this reason, I constantly define many aliases in my shell environment, which I also end up forgetting.

To unclutter my environment, I wrote a small Fish plugin that allows me to write fish abbreviations scoped by directory. To those unfamiliar with fish abbreviations, they are basically like aliases, but you get the command substituted in your prompt after you type it.

What does this look like

To declare your abbreviations, you must write a .abbr file. A .abbr file looks like this:

y=yarn
init=rm -rf node_modules/; and yarn install
run=docker-compose -f config/docker-compose.yml up
clean=rm -rf lib/; and rm -rf node_modules/

Once you have your .abbr file, it will be loaded by fish automatically whenever you enter that directory. The first time fish encounters a .abbr file, you will be prompted to avoid accidentally loading abbreviations that could be harmful. When you leave that directory, fish will restore your abbreviations.

You can also list your current directory abbreviations with dir-abbr-list and force a reload with dir-abbr-reload.

Installing dir-abbr-fish

The plugin is available as a fisher plugin. Just type fisher install rcoedo/dir-abbr-fish.

Enjoy!