I had a long cross-country flight today. Sleep wasn’t in the cards and I couldn’t make any code come out of my fingers.

So, on a whim, I poked and prodded at my shell history, eventually arriving at a list of my most frequently used commands:

sort $HISTFILE | uniq -c | sort --reverse

This sorts zsh‘s history file, which for me is ~/.history, tallies repeated lines, then sorts the most frequently-used lines towards the top.

Here’s what I got. Below is every command I’ve entered ten times or more since I installed Mac OS about six months ago.

 281 s
 168 g s
 111 r
  91 a
  66 x
  63 make && ./jam-1.0.0
  44 g d
  38 make && ./cheezus2-1.0.0
  36 ls
  35 b
  28 gulp
  27 ./cheezus2-1.0.0
  23 u
  22 rz
  22 make
  19 g l
  17 coffee
  15 g pp
  14 x ls
  14 ssh gany
  13 gulp && jpm -b ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox run
  13 ez
  13 d
  11 ./make.js index.jade
  10 x testbed
  10 grunt serve
  10 fg

I’ll explain in detail below, but overall these results tell me that I’m generally keystroke-efficient in the terminal. Four of the top five results are one letter, and something like half of my oft-typed commands are under 5 characters. Bear in mind that even the longish commands here were tab-completed. I make heavy use of alphabeticals to slash the time I spend typing to–subjectively–an insignificant proportion of a given task. So while there’s no shortage of bullshit to hamper my efficiency, I can at least rest assured that typing isn’t contributing. Okay, that’s not entirely true because I use Confluence sometimes, but it’ll be a long time before Atlassian flushes that turd.

• 281 s: My shorthand for the ls command. No surprises here.
• 168 g s: git status. Git has its own alias mechanism which, for some reason, I use.
• 111 r: Builtin zshism for the previous command. Mostly equivalent to !!.
• 91 a: When s isn’t enough. This is ls -alph, a verbose file listing.
• 66 x: Once stood for tmux, now aliased to ecks.pl. TLDR? List tmux sessions.
• 63 make && ./jam-1.0.0: I was a bit surprised to see this so high. I spent most of an 18 hour train ride in March iterating on some procgen boilerplate, but unfortunately didn’t accomplish much except learning I despise OpenGL viewports and apparently can’t do algebra anymore.
• 44 g d: git diff. Naturally.
• 38 make && ./cheezus2-1.0.0: Similar iteration on Cheezus II.
• 36 ls: Apparently, I sometimes fall back into old habits.
• 35 b: This builds whatever’s in the current directory according to whatever build system it looks like it might be using.
• 28 gulp: I should just use b here, but apparently I don’t trust it enough yet.
• 27 ./cheezus2-1.0.0:
• 23 u: Shorthand for cd ...
• 22 rz: Reloads my .zshrc.
• 22 make: Nuff said.
• 19 g l: A colorfuler, denser git log I stole from @stevelosh.
• 17 coffee: CoffeeScript’s REPL
• 15 g pp: git pull, then git push. Evidently I only do this a few times a month.
• 14 x ls: How I listed tmux sessions before I made ecks.
• 14 ssh gany: Shelling into my favoritest server in the whole wide world.
• 13 gulp && jpm -b ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox run: Right after I wiped my laptop and before I had it comfortably tweaked, I worked a lot on a Firefox plugin that I still haven’t released because I’m horrible. Jetpack wasn’t smart enough to detect my brew cask-provided Firefox.
• 13 ez: Edit my .zshrc
• 13 d: My shorthand for cd. Given no arguments, this jumps back to $HOME sweet home.
• 11 ./make.js index.jade: I was too impatient to set up a gulpfile one time.
• 10 x testbed: One of my younger tmux sessions. I’m surprised this is my most frequently attached.
• 10 grunt serve: Run the serve task in Grunt. Use your imagination.
• 10 fg: Pick up a suspended process (usually a C-Z‘d Vim.) Between Vimux, Dispatch and sessions, I don’t need to use this frequently.

Other interesting notes…I’ve run just under 3000 commands total in zsh since I formatted my laptop in December. Of those, there are just under 1000 distinct commands, of which a whopping 768–over 75%–are unique, entered once and never again.

That’s about it. My shell history in, er, a nutshell. What’s yours?