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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

I'll avoid any tools or software that "squats" the one, two or three letter space. Almost all one and many of the two-letters are already "taken" by some script, alias or both. "z" is hibernate for me.

e.g. a timetracker tool "squatted" the "t". I'm the one to decide if this tool is that important to get a one-letter. In this case I had to hack around, fork even, to be able to use t (which is my todo.txt stuff: t, tt, ta, tl, tp, etc) and to use the timetracker (b - no idea why I started using the b for this, decades ago: b, bl, bs, etc).

If a developer of a tool decides to "squat" one of the 27 letters in the alphabet, I think they have delusions of grandeur: You are quite certainly not building one of the 27 most important tools ever built.

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Wouldn't this easily be solved by an alias or setting your script's directory earlier in your $PATH in your shell's RC file? I'm not sure how it's becoming an issue at all. It's just an executable name, in the end, you control your environment.

Yes, fiddling with the $PATH works, until it doesn't.

In this case the app was installed via RBENV, so it works but only if I decide that all of the RBENV stuff must be after anything else, which breaks some other hacks/tricks. So it would work, until I forget about it and years later need some rbenv-installed tool to have precedence over something that was globally installed. After which that alias I forgot about now suddenly breaks.

I hate it when I'm working on A and get distracted because somehow now B fails and some rabbit hole is luring me in. I just want to check my TODO's for today: not fiddle around with $PATHS and aliases.

Aliasing somewhat helps, but is clumsy too:

alias b=t alias t=todotxt alias bl=b list --all

Sure, better organization solves this. But everything would be so much easier if the person writing "t" had stopped and rather just taken 'timetrack', 'ttrack', trac or whatever instead of "t". Somehow we probably won't like it if such a tool suddenly takes over "tr" or "time" either. I feel the same about "t".

There's also unalias.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels weird about shadowing existing executable names. It’s actually fun to find commands I have never used before this way and read about them… then move on picking a different alias name. My dumb rule is anything I would have made a one letter alias, just use that same letter three times (ex: ggg=lazydocker)

What is the 27th letter?

Sorry, Dutch here, We use the IJ, which isn't officially a separate letter, but somehow I learned we have 27 letters (when sorting, the IJ comes before the Z. When capitalizing, IJsselmeer, is right, Ijsselmeer is wrong). ]

26 would be for the English alphabet and therefore the terminal. I was mistaken.

You don't have to write the I and J separately, if you have easy access to Ĳ/ĳ:

    U+0132 LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ
    U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ

(On the EurKEY layout[1] this is as easy as AltGr + k)

[1]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

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