I have always wanted to give something back to the wonderful creators of the Remember The Milk to-do list service. It has been a great tool for me the past couple years by helping me keep organized. Thank you, RTM crew!

Over the last couple months I’ve been taking a bit of spare time to write something that I hope all of us can benefit from: GroovyRTM

Let me tell you how to maximize your productivity on the Bourne Again SHell while minimizing your effort. bash has a ton of tricks and shortcuts that allow you to command it with little effort, and I intend to show you the features that help me day in and day out.

Today I’m going to explain the use of features like history, brace and file expansion, and other tricks by example and give you references for later.

Master your history

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is arguably one of the best productivity enhancing features of any shell.

I recently ran into a case where I was violating the DRY principle by having to encode part of a string every time I added to it. After some digging I found the solution: Groovy Categories.

A bit of Groovy background

A couple key features of Groovy are that everything is an object and that operators are just syntactic sugar for calling methods on the objects. What’s cool about this is that with Groovy you can override the default behavior of these operators for certain classes. For example, 4 + 2 in Groovy really means 4.plus(2)