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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

I like the contemporary alternative to the classics. They make a lot of thing so much easier.

I have a little mental block, though. It's related to the realities of the stuff I work on. Since I find myself logged into other people systems, keeping the old, standard tools hot in my head does really take some of the load off. It's a pretty common refrain, but it's real and practical when you've got embedded systems, bsds, linuxes, macs, etc. Even the difference between gnu and mac is clunky when I don't practice enough.

For the same reason, with the notable exception of git, I use practically no aliases.

If I could invent a product, maybe it would be one that enables effectively "forwarding" CLIs to a remote host shell.

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I'm with you. I find that I feel like I know Linux like the back of my hands because I can fluidly interface with stock tools with a breeze. These new tools are great but I just don't see them widely spread across many remote systems that I manage. Just managing those packages across a fleet sounds like a pain in the ass.

These new tools are great but I just don't see them widely spread across many remote systems

I had smart, experience people tell me not to waste my time using the GNU tools for this exact reason back in the day

Nothing like logging into a freshly installed Solaris system and having to configure it using Bourne shell, which didn't have job control or history. At least it had vi. Usually the first thing you would do is get enough networking going to download bash and the GNU tools. But there were always some old timers around who wanted to haze the youngsters by forcing you to do everything with "native" tools.

> Just managing those packages across a fleet sounds like a pain in the ass.

Use Homebrew?

I spend a lot of time remoting into fresh *nix systems, so I also almost don't have any aliases, with one notable exception : ll (aliased to ls -lah).

It's just so engrained into my muscle memory that I do it without thinking about it most of the time.

And the workaround I found for it is adding a macro on my keyboard (through QMK but can be done with anything) that just types out 'alias ll="ls -lah"\n'.

Yeah, same here. I am doing a good amount of ops/SRE stuff these days while supporting my services and find myself ssh'ing into:

- very locked down bastions - hosts through a secure remote access VM thing that makes file transfer difficult - random docker containers in EKS (often through both of the above)

Getting good at the basic tools is just unavoidable. I find myself manually typing `alias k = kubectl` a lot though :p

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