How to Create Aliases on macOS with Terminal

Aliases are those badass secret identities and mysteries that developers type into their terminal to perform a task faster and make their workflow simpler. For the longest time, I procrastinated creating aliases because the thought of learning how to do it seemed really hard. But actually, it's extremely easy. And its made my life SO MUCH better, so I wanted to share how to do it.

Creating Aliases for Zsh Shell

• Go to your terminal
• Type in the command

  cd ~
  

  To make sure you are at your root directory,
• Then type in

  open .zshrc
  

  to open up your .zshrc folder. You should see a screen like this:

• Scroll down to where it says something like # alias ohmyzsh="mate ~/.oh-my-zsh"

• After the hashes, type in your own alias, i.e.:

  alias cmsg="git commit -m"
  

  Every time I want to run git commit -m, I can now use cmsg to do that task.

• Next Cmd + S to Save. Close the window.

• THEN for the changes to take affect, you will have to enter the following in your terminal:

  source .zshrc
  

Example Aliases

Alias names can often be hard to come up with for beginners—I know it was for me until I saw a senior engineer using some of them—so some examples would be:

alias project:start="yarn"
alias project:build="yarn project build"
alias project:test="yarn test"

alias project:start="yarn && yarn project build"
alias project="/application/documents/project/project-file"

Voilà! You can now use your alias to perform the task you want faster.

If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on Twitter !