Ubuntu Shell Tweaks

I already told you that my favorite operating system is Ubuntu. I run it on my laptop, I run it on my desktop, and I run it on most of the servers I administer.

Since I spend most of my working hours in a terminal, staring at the shell, I need a comfortable environment. Thankfully, Ubuntu ships with bash-completion enabled, which makes Tab completion truly awesome. (If it's not enabled for you, make sure that the package bash-completion is installed and /etc/bash_completion is sourced in your ~/.bashrc.)


Here's a couple of other highly recommended tweaks to improve your shell usage:

Colored Shell Prompt:

Unfortunately a colored prompt isn't turned on by default, but fortunately it's easily activated by uncommenting force_color_prompt=yes in ~/.bashrc. Although it's claimed that "the focus in a terminal window should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt", with which I generally agree, I think the best way to focus on the output is by clearly differentiating it from the prompt.

Here's a one-liner which enables the color prompt:

sed -ri~ '/#(force_color_prompt|if|    |fi|alias .?grep)/s/#//' ~/.bashrc

Custom Bash Aliases:

When working within a shell, the most common commands tend to be changing directories and listing directory contents. And when operating on files or directories with potentially dangerous commands, you normally don't get asked "Are you sure?" by default.

That's why I always add some custom aliases to make working with the shell easier and safer. The above command which enabled a color prompt also ensures that an existing alias definition file will be used (since previous versions of Ubuntu sadly had the source command commented out).

You can simply create such a file and save it as ~/.bash_aliases. Here's what mine contains as a minimum:

# some more ls aliases
alias l='ls -CF'
alias la='ls -Al'
alias ll='ls -l'
alias c='clear'
alias cla='c;la'
alias cll='c;ll'
alias cls='c;ls'

# Some more aliases to avoid making mistakes:
alias cp='cp -i'
alias ln='ln -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'

As you can see, aliases are a great way to create shortcuts for common commands (and command combinations) or to set new default options.

I like to create aliases for ssh connections, e. g. alias servername='ssh servername', so I only have to type a server's name to securely connect to it. (You could also add server-specific options, for instance which username or port to use, but that should better be specified in ~/.ssh/config.)