The Power of Comma

♯Proposal

Many of us keep a number of scripts (or other homebrew applications) in our ~/bin directory to assist with various common tasks. I have a powerful find/replace script, various screenshot commands, a journal management script, a script to publish my website, a script to refresh the current list of known MIME types, and more.

The proposal is that for some script foo, just call it ,foo instead!

Let's consider an example of what that might look like (reduced example):

➜ ls ~/bin
,j      ,replace-all   ,ss-region   ,ss-window    
janet   odin           terraform    plantuml

We can immediately tell that the scripts I wrote start with a comma, and the other executables in that path do not.

♯Why Bother?

Yay for commas? Why should anyone care? I don't have the original blog post that I referenced, but I can convey what I have enjoyed about this approach - it boils down to one major thing:

Trivial Discoverability

Discoverability can have a massive impact on workflow. The comma gives me something that is unique where it matters:

• When I press tab to show available commands.
• When I list the contents of my bin directory.
• When I reverse search command history.
• When I want to run a command using rofi.

If I don't exactly remember a name but I'm pretty sure I wrote something, I can just type ,<TAB> and get a complete list of every script/executable that I have. This easy pattern extends to manual review where I can trivially, visually parse results.

It Costs Nothing

Nothing about how I work broke - it just got easier. The time "cost" to update names to start with a comma was actually beneficial regardless as I was long overdue for reviewing my current set of scripts.

♯Conclusion

Try the comma and you may enjoy it. Or don't. This isn't some revolutionary technique that will skyrocket your productivity, but it's nice and I like it.