Fish has a wonderful little built-in feature called "abbreviations", which let
you autocomplete predefined snippets like gs into commands like git status.
However, maintaining long lists of such abbreviations clutter your config.fish:
# Package management.
abbr -ga 'a' 'sudo apt'
abbr -ga 'ai' 'sudo apt install'
abbr -ga 'ar' 'sudo apt autoremove --purge'
abbr -ga 'as' 'apt search'
abbr -ga 'ah' 'apt help'
Not too bad. Could be better. This plugin lets you do the same via ~/.config/fish/abbrfile:
# Package management.
a sudo apt
ai sudo apt install
ar sudo apt autoremove --purge
as apt search
ah apt help
You can have any number of spaces (but not tabs) between abbreviations and expansions.
Personally, I find this approach easier to maintain across machines than dealing with
"universal variables", and much cleaner than maintaining lists of abbr commands.
If you agree, this plugin is easily installable via fisher:
fisher add jabirali/fish-abbrfile
Another common usecase for abbreviations is that you want to autocorrect UNIX
commands like ls, find, grep, cat to modern replacements like exa,
fd, rg, and bat. These are faster, smarter, and prettier
than their classic counterparts. But they may not be available on every machine
you check your dotfiles into, so such autocorrection can get in the way on many
systems. This plugin solves that my checking that a command is valid before
performing an abbreviation: so if you write the following in your abbrfile,
# Better coreutils.
ls exa
find fd
grep rg
cat bat -p
then e.g. find will only be autocorrected to fd on systems where fd is
installed. You can add multiple entries with the same name; in the following
example, the plugin prefers the editor nvim over vim, and vim over vi,
but resorts to vi when that's the only available:
# Better editors.
vi vim
vi nvim
Note that the plugin also understands basic sudo usage; if it detects sudo,
it will use the next argument to check whether the command is installed. Thus,
if you e.g. want to type pkg install across Manjaro Linux (sudo pamac install),
Ubuntu Linux (sudo apt install), and macOS (brew install), this should work:
# Package manager.
pkg sudo apt
pkg sudo pamac
pkg brew