There are several tricks that could help anyone become faster and more productive when working with the terminal. I wrote about several ways
1. Create aliases
A have a folder called "Programming" that I want to access very often from the terminal. Now typing "cd /home/alex/Programming" isn't a big deal, but I managed to shorten that to just "cdp", which is far more comfortable and a lot faster. But aliasing isn't just for shortening commands. You can also set a default behaviour to other commands. For example, if you want ls to list hidden files by default, you could create an alias for "ls -a" to be just "ls".
Creating aliases is easy: edit your .bashrc file and add your aliases line by line like this
alias ls='ls -a'
2. Use variables
There was a time when I wanted to move several files from different folders to the same folder (which had quite a long path). Then I had to repeat this a few minutes later, this time using other files. Instead of doing mv <my_files> <long_path_to_folder> over and over again, I saved the long path to a (short :D ) variable and used that instead, thus saving time. There are definitely better uses for variables, but I appreciated their existence. To create a new variable, type
varname=value
and then, to access its value use $varname.
3. Symbolic links
If you ever downloaded, for example, Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA, you had to run the programs by typing something like <path_to_executable>/exec, which can get annoying after a while, especially, as in the previous situation, when you have a long path. Now I start IDEA by just typing idea in the terminal. Here's how it all works.
When you type a command in the terminal, that command is searched for in dedicated folders and, if found, is executed. We need to let those dedicated folders know that when we type idea in the terminal, then <path_to_idea>/idea.sh has to be executed. Welcome to symbolic links!
A symbolic link will hold a reference to your file. Go to /user/bin and type ln -s <path_to_idea> idea. You need to be superuser to run this. Then log out and log back in and now you can start IDEA (or whatever you want) using the command you've just set. :)
