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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

Faced with the choice of punishing myself for making a mistake vs. adapting my environment to accommodate me, I'll always choose the latter.

(Plus, since you use `ls` so frequently, just make `l` an alias of it, especially if you have difficulty typing "ls"! Using a computer doesn't have to be some weird, punishing, bondage and discipline experience.)

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Agree. It's why I alias . to pwd and .. to go up a directory.

those are great, definitely adding those aliases.

And "alias ...='cd ../../'" etc. Gotta love this feature.

Here are some of what I use:

    alias   -- -='cd -'
    alias     ..='cd ..'
    alias    ...='cd ../..'
    alias   ....='cd ../../..'
    alias  .....='cd ../../../..'
    alias ......='cd ../../../../..'
    
    alias l=ls
    alias la='ls -a'
    alias ll='ls -l'
    alias lla='ls -la'

I personally have a single function that takes care of all of those dotted aliases:

    function up {
        local ups="."
        for((i=0;i<${1:-1};i++)); do
    		ups="${ups}/.."
    	done
    	cd "$ups"
    }

I appreciate the DRY-ness of it, but that requires you to type 'up ...' which is longer :(

A while ago when I was bored I was thinking of golfing those aliases to say (pseudocode):

    for i in 2..6:
      alias '.'*i=cd '../'*i

but I didn't know all the shell needed and just wound up leaving it as is.

Edit: turns out Zsh has a 'repeat' built-in:

    alias $(repeat 7 echo -n '.')="cd $(repeat 7 echo -n '../')"

Still, non-portable, less clear, not worth changing the aliases.

I have had this in my .zshrc for years:

  # Quick ../../.. from https://github.com/blueyed/oh-my-zsh
  resolve-alias() {
    # Recursively resolve aliases and echo the command.
    typeset -a cmd
    cmd=(${(z)1})
    while (( ${+aliases[$cmd[1]]} )) \
              && [[ ${aliases[$cmd[1]]} != $cmd ]]; do
        cmd=(${(z)aliases[${cmd[1]}]})
    done
    echo $cmd
  }
  rationalise-dot() {
    # Auto-expand "..." to "../..", "...." to "../../.." etc.
    # It skips certain commands (git, tig, p4).
    #
    # resolve-alias is defined in a separate function.

    local MATCH # keep the regex match from leaking to the environment.

    # Skip pasted text.
    if (( PENDING > 0 )); then
        zle self-insert
        return
    fi

    if [[ $LBUFFER =~ '(^|/| ||'$'\n''|\||;|&)\.\.$' ]] \
           && ! [[ $(resolve-alias $LBUFFER) =~ '(git|tig|p4)' ]]; then
        LBUFFER+=/
        zle self-insert
        zle self-insert
    else
        zle self-insert
    fi
  }
  zle -N rationalise-dot
  bindkey . rationalise-dot
  bindkey -M isearch . self-insert 2>/dev/null

For doing "cd ../.." I type "cd ...", each extra "." adds a "/.." to the argument.

It works for any command, cp/mv/whatever.

There may be nicer versions, certainly shorter versions are there if I search "rationalise-dot" in Google.

Why stop there? `shopt -s autocd`

I’ve used these aliases since I first started using csh (below syntax for zsh):

  alias   .=cd
  alias   ,=pushd
  alias   ,,=popd
  alias   ,.='dirs -v'

No need to alias .. as in zsh you can use a dir name as a command to cd to it. Setting cdpath can further cut down on typing. For example

  cdpath=(. .. ~/go/src ~/src ~)

It's a joke. I don't think anyone is mistyping it, as it's two characters on alternate hands on the home row.

I've mistyped it many times, precisely because it's alternate hands. Sometimes the left hand descends first.

Perhaps handedness is a contributing factor. I imagine even amongst practiced typists, the non-dominant hand tends towards more technical/physical errors than the dominant hand. Errors might include descending early, late, drifting from the center of keys, a tendency to follow the sequence of the fingers, etc....

I come to this idea because I am left-handed and if I have made this mistake, it has happened infrequently enough that I can recall neither a particular event nor the fact of such events having occurred. I would be curious about the handedness of people who make this mistake frequently (enough) and those who believe they do not.

It's one of the most famous mistyped commands

https://man.cx/sl(6)

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