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Comment by kej | Hacker News Reader

One thing I miss about Mercurial was only having to type enough of a subcommand to be unambiguous. `hg st` is much shorter than `git status`. I wish all CLI tools worked that way.

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> I wish all CLI tools worked that way.

Agreed, but at least for git, this is easily resolved:

  # $HOME/.gitconfig
  [alias]
    br = branch
    co = checkout
    st = status

Neat, but long ago even that became too much. I use a bunch of alias like this:

    alias gs='git status'
    alias gco='git checkout'
    alias gb='git branch'
    alias gp='git push'
    alias gf='git pull'  # aka fetch
    # and many more

Interestingly, I ported these from hg aliases almost a decade ago. They were the same but with a leading 'h'.

How does that differ from tab autocomplete?

It's built in to the Mercurial CLI, whereas tab autocomplete is an additional feature to the user's shell. Thus, by default, every user will have access to the Mercurial shortnames, while only users with autocomplete enabled in their shell (or with autocomplete available for their shell) will have the autocomplete available.

Also, autocomplete is still an additional keypress...

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