bzr alias

I now officially have some of my code in an open source project where the work was actually done entirely on my own time. Despite being involved with professional software development for almost twenty years, I've normally kept my programming to work hours, or private projects.

This time though, it was different. This time it was truly scratching an itch. I've become somewhat of a Bazaar convert. Bazaar has for a long time allowed you to define command aliases in your bazaar.conf configuration file. I have always used bash aliases for commands that I do really often, so it seemed natural to me to define aliases for bazaar for commands that I used often as well.

Next came the internal conflict. I am an inherently lazy person. This is why I like aliases, less typing. One of the things that bugged me was having to actually edit the configuration file any time I wanted to add or modify an alias. This bugged me. It bugged me so much it caused me to actually do something about it. Luckily for me Bazaar is written primarily in python, and this just happens to be my current favourite language.

The code is now committed to trunk, and should be available generally in bzr 1.6.

• bzr alias — lists your current aliases
  


• bzr alias commit="commit --strict" — sets the alias for commit


• bzr alias commit — print out the current alias for commit


• bzr alias --remove commit — removes the commit alias

Obviously if you use alaises as much as I do, one of the first things you'll do is set the alias for unalias.

bzr alias unalias="alias --remove"

My current aliases (that I'll tell you about):

tim@slacko:~/src/bzr/alias-command$ ./bzr alias
bzr alias cbranch="cbranch --lightweight --hardlink"
bzr alias col="checkout --lightweight"
bzr alias commit="commit --strict"
bzr alias lastdiff="diff -r-2..-1"
bzr alias lastlog="log -r-2..-1"
bzr alias ll="log --line -r-10..-1"
bzr alias my-missing="missing --mine-only"
bzr alias unalias="alias --remove"