Bracket Expansion

Let’s say you want to update capybara and capybara-webkit. You’d normally type this:

gem update capybara capybara-webkit

But you’re busy, you don’t have time to type “capybara” twice. Let’s see what tab completion has for us:

gem update capybara{,-webkit}

The bracket expression expands to the same thing as above because the brackets expand to "capybara" + "" and "capybara" + "-webkit". If you’re in ZSH, you can press the TAB key (gem update capybara{,-webkit}<TAB>) and it will expand the expression for you inline. Bash users, this will still work for you, even without the neat TAB trick.

cd’ing to frequently-used directories in ZSH

Josh just dropped some sweet, sweet ZSH knowledge. I spend a lot of time in the directories under $HOME/thoughtbot/ and $HOME/src, and to get there I type (for example) cd ~/thoughtbot/hoptoad. There is a better way!

First, add this to your ~/.zshrc and source it:

setopt auto_cd
cdpath=($HOME/thoughtbot $HOME/src)

Obviously, use different paths in cdpath depending on which directories you cd into a lot.

Now let’s try it out:

$ cd rspec-core # Autocompleted from rspe<TAB>
$ pwd
/Users/gabe/src/rspec-core
$ cd hoptoad
$ pwd
/Users/gabe/thoughtbot/hoptoad

Seriously, check out your coworkers’ dotfiles. It can improve your workflow efficiency by an order of magnitude. Like most of the Thoughtbot crew, Josh keeps his dotfiles on Github.