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A useful but hard to find package for unix users


04/09/2017     permalink     linked site


alias woman=eg made my most easy-to-remember term command. I typed it only one time, then i quickly forgot about eg, and used woman each time man was not helping.

Recently, on a brand new system, woman raised an error about a non-found eg. What the hell is eg ?

Well, eg is hard to find. I searched with my distribution package manager, it was not really useful. Then i remembered that eg could be a python package, so i searched for it on pypi.

Scheisse.

I finally tried the universal fix: put eg in the pypi URL directly.

3-letters are IMHO the bare minimum to name things (git, sed, cut and ack for instance). With only 2 letters, you have most of the time way to much words that contains them, for instance eg or ag (btw, this last use the silver searcher as preferred name, which make it more easily searchable).

Program names should not be given with efficiency/size in mind. It's the role of aliases, that each user will define, to provides efficient keystroke.