You probably type too much.

I had a feeling I type too much. But I wasn’t sure how. So like any programmer, I got a computer to figure it out for me.

What did I type? Is there a history of everything I’ve typed? Something I can mine for interesting data?

~ wc ~/.zsh_history
17185   85023  723154 /Users/paul/.zsh_history

That is a bunch of data. And once I turned off de-duplication, for this experiment, it became a bunch more.

What do I type?

What shouldn’t I type? As it turns out, the answer is ‘git’. I’ve typed ‘git’ 6642 times, which is 6642 too many. A lot more than any other command.

git 6642
cd 988
gap 524
rm 487
ruby 452
ls 427
rails 407
rake 315
gem 268
mate 262

Here is the frequency graph of how I used my commands.

583 commands appear > 1 times
217 commands appear > 2 times
110 commands appear > 5 times
78 commands appear > 10 times
58 commands appear > 20 times
32 commands appear > 50 times
23 commands appear > 100 times
11 commands appear > 250 times

There are 32 commands which I’ve typed more than 50 times, many of which could use a great alias. The other 500+ commands, not so worried about those because I don’t use them very much.

How do I do this?

Huffshell is a gem which will looks at your history and generate a command tree based on what you type. It will also make basic suggestions for improvements.

Surprises Patterns

Huffshell even shows me there are patterns in my commit messages. I think about my changes primarily in terms of adding features or code and secondarily in terms of removing.

git 5141
  commit 3734
    -m 3726
      "add 538
      "remove 259
      "can 161
      "fix 128
      "change 110
      "bump 104
      "move 102
      "make 100
      "show 84