this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Shell Scripting

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Productivity vs muscle memory/knowledge (programming.dev)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

After a long time I'm in a situation where I sometimes work on a temporary system without my individual setup. Now whenever I might add a new custom (nushell) command that abstracts the usage of CLI tools, I think about the loss of muscle memory/knowledge for these tools and how much time I waste looking them up without my individual setup. No, that's not a huge amount of time, but just out of curiosity I'd like to know how I can minimize this problem as much as possible.

Do you have some tips and solutions to handle this dilemma? I try to shadow and wrap existing commands, whenever it's possible, but that's often not the case. Abbreviations in fish are optimal for this problem in some cases, but I don't think going back to fish as my main shell for this single reason would be worth it.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

What's the nature of the temporary system?

I would consider; remote/temporary systems are not necessarily mine, or setup is not worth it given my concerns on it; There's different options to install or configure existing shells, I could take my config with me; if it's a temporary system maybe it's based on a template that could be adjusted, or auto-setup scripts could be adjusted

It would depend on how much I use it, how much I miss my setup, or how irritated I get because of missing stuff, and considerations of whether it's worth it (to me).

I'm someone who adjusts their environment to their needs and wants, moreso than other colleagues I see. Many people seem to simply accept existing environments and (to me) annoyances.

When I remote into servers, it's not typically where I would use much Nushell functionality. Bash and vim is good enough for those things, with just a little bit of configuration. I don't plan on installing it on work servers, but have recently thought I may install it on my own server for convenience.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have a public git repository that I keep those kinds of recipes in.

So on a temporary system, I usually clone that repository first, so I can reuse past solutions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Me, too, and it works for other Linux distros, but in this case it's a Windows Sandbox. Unless it's copy and paste, for this case it wouldn't be worth it and I assume there can be similar situations in the future for other reasons.

I once started to work on auto-setup scripts for Windows, but the unpredictable nature of it made me give up on that :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I once started to work on auto-setup scripts for Windows, but the unpredictable nature of it made me give up on that :D

Yeah. This still sucks, but is getting substantially better every year. My lazy rule of thumb is if I find a solution inside of WMI (Windows Management Interface), then I'll script it. Otherwise, I figure I'm wasting my time as it will change anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I assume there can be similar situations in the future for other reasons.

You may be happily surprised - we don't agree on much in technology, but bootstrapping with git is supported in places where nothing else works, and is finally also even popular among Windows engineers.

I recall encountering two exceptional cases:

  • An 'almost never change anything' immutable distribution like Batocera.
  • A host with no Internet access.

In both cases, I still version the relevant scripts in the same git repository, but I end up getting scrappy for deploying them.

On an immutable distribution, I'll curl, wget, or Invoke-WebRequest to get a copy of each file I need, as I need them. I encounter this often enough that I find it worth putting copies into a public S3 bucket with a touch of nice DNS in front. It does wonders for me remembering the correct path to each file.

On a completely offline distribution, I run git init --bare in a folder on a the root of a thumb drive or network share, and then I git push a shallow copy of my scripts repo to it, and git clone from it on the machine to work on. I also simply file copy a copy as well, in case I cannot get git bootstrapped on the offline machine.

I do still bother with the git version because I invariably need to make a tiny nuanced script correction, and it's so much easier (for my work patterns) to sync it back later with git.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

but in this case it's a Windows Sandbox.

If it's Windows 10 or later, winget is preinstalled (sort of / mostly) and has acess to a release of git. (WinGet is available on 'Modern' Windows 10 and later., and it may take a few minutes to bootstrap itself after first login.)

So I'm able to bootstrap this pattern on Windows with something like:

winget install --id Git.Git -e --source winget

Syntax from Stack Overflow

I'm pretty sure I just use winget install Git.Git, but someone on SO recommends the above longer version. I'm guessing it prevents an interactive prompt, since there are more than one package source for git, if I recall.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think it really depends how much time you actuall spend working on these temporary systems, and what mechanisms are available for automatically configuring those systems, even temporarily. You can generally assume that some version of bash is available on all systems, so if you have a bashrc that you like, you could use sshrc or kyrat to at least bring over some functions and aliases (I used sshrc long ago but haven't tried kyrat): https://github.com/cdown/sshrc, https://github.com/fsquillace/kyrat

If you do want to use nushell on remote systems, possibly xxh would enable that; I haven't used it personally, but it looks promising: https://github.com/xxh/xxh

If you're not using ssh, then it really depends what you are doing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is cool! It doesn't fit my current situation. The temporary system I'm dealing with now is a Windows Sandbox for a school project. While it could take a few minutes to install winget and the necessary tools, I'd rather not risk the potential of troubleshooting time, because of the limited amount of time I work on it physically (and because I'm cursed with troubleshooting nightmares on Windows).

But I'll have a look on xxh. It could definitely improve my comfort with servers that do not maintain nushell packages.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hm, I'm not sure what you're looking for, then.

How are fish abbreviations different from nushell aliases for working on temporary machines? Surely your Windows sandboxes don't have fish installed?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Since fish abbreviations get replaced by the actual abstracted content before the execution, I'm more concise about the tools. And thus I'd remember the ways without my setup better. Then again, it only works for small stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Oh, I see, so you don't exercise your muscle memory but you at least see the "raw" commands more often.

Looks like this was suggested in nushell, and someone came up with a way to emulate the behavior manually: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5552#issuecomment-2113935091

Edit: there's another issue for this: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5597

Hopefully nu will decide to implement it properly in the future.