- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment - When I got a year or two …

I would still call my Python scripts “scripts.” I don’t think the term “scripts” is limited to shell scripts.

When I had one nix computer, I wanted to customize it heavily. Now I have many nix computers and I want them consistent and with only the most necessary packages installed.

On the other hand, the author seems to have a lot of experience as well. Personally I tend to agree... there is a very small subset of things I find worth aliasing. I have a very small amount and probably only use half of them regularly. Frankly I wonder how my use case is so different. edit: In the case of the author I guess he's probably wants to live in the terminal full time. And perhaps offline. there is a lot of static data he's stored like http status codes: https://codeberg.org/EvanHahn/dotfiles/src/commit/843b9ee13d... In my case i'd start typing it in my browser then just click something i've visited 100 times before. There is something to be said about reducing that redundant network call but I dont think it makes much practical difference and the mental mapping/discoverability of aliases isnt nothing.

I am going through a phase of working with younger engineers who have many dotfiles, and I just think "Oh, yeh, I remember having lots of dotfiles. What a hassle that was." Nowadays I just try to be quite selective with my tooling and learn to change with it - "like water", so to speak. (I say this with no shade to those who like maintaining their dotfiles - it takes all sorts :))

I prefer using kubectl than any other method so i have plenty of functions to help with that. I'd never consider using python or go for this although I do have plenty of python and go "scripts" on my path too.

Yeah - been there, done that, too. I feel like the time I gain from having a shortcut is often less that what I wound need to maintain it or to remember the real syntax when I'm on a machine where it's not available (which happens quite often in my case). I try to go with system defaults as much as possible nowadays.

Prepare to swing back again. With nearly 30 years experience I find the shell to be the best integration point for so many things due to its ability to adapt to whatever is needed and its universal availability. My use of a vanilla shell has been reduced to scripting cases only.

If you come through the other side, you set up LocalCommand in your .ssh/config which copies your config to every server you ssh to, and get your setup everywhere.