As I said before, I’m trying to save some time when using the CLI, and I rely more and more on aliases.

Aliases are fantastic to save some keystrokes, and they also significantly help with something else: freeing mental space.

Some commands take a lot of arguments and options, and it’s not always simple to remember all of them. I’ve decided to stop remembering everything and created an abstraction on top of the one I often use, hiding the long list of arguments under an alias or a command. If I still have trouble remembering the alias, I can still rely on my alias to find aliases.

One of the examples of such a command with a long list of arguments is the PHP command when it comes to debugging a PHP script.

On my machine, with PhpStorm, it goes like php -dxdebug.mode=debug -dxdebug.client_host=127.0.0.1 -dxdebug.client_port=9000 -dxdebug.start_with_request=yes script.php.

You probably could have different options on your machine.

I’ve introduced a simple alias, xdebug, to avoid thinking about specifing mode, port and client:

alias xdebug='php -dxdebug.mode=debug \
 -dxdebug.client_host=127.0.0.1
 \ -dxdebug.client_port=9000
 \ -dxdebug.start_with_request=yes'

Now, debugging a script is as easy as xdebug script.php and I don’t have to look for the documentation, or look through my zsh history, to see how I need to construct my command.

Keystrokes and time saved, memory freed!