From bash to zsh and everywhere in between, show me yours and I’ll show you mines. Inspire others or get some feedback.

Simply copy & paste the output of alias in your terminal or add some comments to explain things for others.

Edit: Kbin users, click ‘More’ on a comment and use the fediverse link to read responses that have funky formatting

  • macallikOP
    7•1 year ago

    Good to see another exa user. Care to break down what yay does btw?

    • megane-kunEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Ah, yay is an AUR helper, though I personally see it as a pacman helper as well. Link here. Some of the flags and options that can be used for pacman can be used for yay, thus, some of the flags in the aliases I use are actually for pacman. Anyways, on to the breakdown.

      alias yy='yay -Y --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'

      This one is what I use to look up for packages. The result of runnning yy «search term» would be a list of packages matching the search term and prompting the user on which package(s) to install.

      flag description
      -Y performs yay-specific operations.
      --needed (pacman) do not reinstall up to date packages
      --norebuild skips package build if in cache and up to date
      --nocleanafter do not remove package sources after successful build
      --noredownlod skip pkgbuild download if in cache and up to date
      --nodiffmenu don’t show diffs for build files
      --nocleanmenu don’t clean build PKGBUILDS
      --removemake remove makedepends after install
      --sudoloop loop sudo calls in the background to avoid timeout

      alias ya='yay -S --needed --norebuild --nocleanafter --nodiffmenu --noredownload --nocleanmenu --removemake --sudoloop'

      This one is what I use for installing packages. Useful if I already know what package I would be installing.

      flag description
      -S (pacman, extended by Yay to cover AUR as well) Synchronize packages. Packages are installed directly from the remote repositories, including all dependencies required to run the packages.

      alias yu='yay -R --recursive --nosave'

      This one is what I use when uninstalling packages. I usually check the package name with something like yay -Qi «package-name-guess» beforehand.

      flag description
      -R (pacman, extended by Yay to also remove cached data about devel packages) Remove package(s) from the system.
      --recursive (pacman) Remove each target specified including all of their dependencies, provided that (A) they are not required by other packages; and (B) they were not explicitly installed by the user. This operation is recurisve and analogous to a backwards --sync operation.
      --nosave (pacman) Instructs pacman to ignore file backup designations. (This avoids the removed files being renamed with a .pacsave extension.)

      I actually don’t know much about both yay and pacman myself, since the aliases were just passed onto me by the same friend who helped me (re-)install my system (long story) and set-up the aliases. Having looked all these up, however, I might make a few changes (like changing the --nocleanafter and --nocleanmenu options to their clean ones`).