This one I use daily without thinking about it - it shares my bash history between screens and sessions on a given machine and extends it (grabbed from some cor

This one I use daily without thinking about it - it shares my bash history between screens and sessions on a given machine and extends it (grabbed from some corner of the internet): # shares history between tabs with prompt_command HISTSIZE=9000 HISTFILESIZE=$HISTSIZE HISTCONTROL=ignorespace:ignoredups _bash_history_sync() { builtin history -a #1 appends command to histfile HISTFILESIZE=$HISTSIZE #2 sets max size builtin history -c #3 clears current session history builtin history -r #4 reads the updated histfile and makes that the current history } history() { #5 overrides build in history to sync it before display _bash_history_sync builtin history "$@" } PROMPT_COMMAND=_bash_history_sync Sometimes I forget the name of git branches I've worked on lately. This displays them with dates, most recent at the bottom: git_branch_dates() { git for-each-ref --sort=authordate --format '%(authordate:iso) %(align:left,25)%(refname:short)%(end) %(subject)' refs/heads } Because I hate typing: # for rails migrations and keeping test updated alias migrate="rake db:migrate && RAILS_ENV=test rake db:migrate" Something I should use more to track things I've done lately - this opens up vim at the end of a file in your home dir called did.txt, appends the date and puts cursor at the last line: # didfile setup alias did="vim +'normal Go' +'r!date' ~/did.txt" Because sometimes you want to sudo an alias: # trailing space in value expands aliases that come after, see: http://www.linuxcommand.org/lc3_man_pages/aliash.html alias sudo='sudo ' And displaying the git branch in the prompt: # this gets the git branch to display when I cd into a git repo parse_git_branch() { git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/' } export PS1="\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\[\033[32m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\]\$ " Because I often want to check recent files: alias llth='ls -hFlat | head'