Tools to make shell work productive

Question

In our shell day by day work we have some tools/methods that make our work on shell a more productive.

Here a short list of such things I use in a day by day base:

• Ctrl+R to search interactive hrough bash history
• bash auto completion. This helps me to complete with Tab makefile targets, man pages etc.
• autojump to make directory navigation faster
• colorgcc to colorize the terminal output of GCC so error messages can be found within longer compiler outputs.
• GNU screen can be helpful sometimes too

Recently I recalled my old friend autoexpect, which "remembers" what command you executed and what you entered. I use it "automate" scp commands for example.

Please share your tools.

Answer 1

I work a lot with git so my PS1 is showing me its status - my git prompt

Answer 2

Btw, it is kind of a question, the guy is asking for us to share our knowledge.

I use/like a lot of the tools you've mentioned. I definitely like having a color coded shell, but some of the more productivity inducing things I use are thoughtful aliases in my .bashrc. I have one for scptgz which, because I'm lazy, I don't actually have to tarball anything before I blast it off over scp. Also I alias all my common ssh hosts. Finally on our systems I have an alias sql='mysql --i-am-a-dummy -u user -p'. Let's be honest, people do an update without a where clause sometimes.