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bediger
The money quote (of the analytical section):

Yet, research in human-computer interaction barely acknowledges the command line's existence. It's a strange omission, since the core principles of human factors engineering still apply to the console.

Why is this? I've also noticed a corollary, that interface testing for "experts" doesn't really use expert testing. One paper I've read (name eludes me) about text editor usability had the nominal "expert" users ignoring regular expression searching, and just scrolling about randomly for the assigned phrase.

Either truly "expert" users are so few and far between that researchers can't find them, or the researchers can't tell who qualifies as an "expert" and who doesn't.

KC8ZKF
Or, most text files are small.
mdonahoe
I feel validated , since I recently wrote some aliases that quickly switch me to my frequently used directories.

Logging to a database is an excellent idea.

tmhedberg
I highly recommend autojump[1] as a simple way to jump to commonly-used working directories. It's saved me a lot of repetitive typing since I discovered it.

[1] https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump

mattmight
Thanks for the pointer!

I've updated the post with this and several other simplifications sent in by readers.

GICodeWarrior
No real need for a Perl script here.

    alias frequency='sort | uniq -c'
Also, this should probably use exec.

    system(". cdto '@row'") ;
    exit ;
Otherwise, you are needlessly keeping Perl on your stack.
rcfox
(I have a feeling that) my frequently used commands change depending on what I'm doing, and with time. Instead of trying to alias my current favourite commands, I tend to just use the backwards history search built in to my shell, and access it with Ctrl-R. I can type the beginning of the command and have the rest of it completed for me.

The only thing that would make it better is Ido-style completion.