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Comment by aendruk | Hacker News Reader

I tend to give programs longer, more descriptive names and then do the short names as shell aliases. That way there’s little risk of name collision for the original program, scripts using the canonical name remain readable, and the shorthand is free to evolve to fit varying work habits.

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My keyboard came with a tab key, so I don't worry about my commands having short names.

Until you have five commands which all use the prefix `sort-incoming-` and then three commands named `sort-incoming-hourly` and `sort-incoming-monthly` etc.

It would be nice to have camel-case completion in the shell, i.e. have “SIH” be completed to “SortIncomingHourly” and “SIM” to “SortIncomingMonthly”, etc. (only for upper-case characters). That way one could get more mileage out of the possible character combinations.

Well, not exactly tab completion, but I have `fzf`[0] tied to my history search.

That allows me to type `soriloco`, punch ctrl+r and be prompted with `some ridiculously long command` (if, of course, I've run it before).

Combined with infinite history this trick has saved me a bunch of typing and even proper remembering. :P

[0]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Yes, fuzzy matching is the way to go. Tab completion isn’t good enough any more.

Why do the names have to be shorter, I never have to type it all out just the first couple of letters and then autocomplete. Dealing with aliases/“shortcuts” is such a pain plus I hate that pattern anyways.

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