How to

Improve your workflow by swearing

No really let the F word flow

Credits

Introduction

Disclaimer, this article contains swear words. Mainly F**k.

A few months back I was writing some aliases into my .bashrc file. I was given a hint to install a library called The Fuck and it immediately changed my workflow. It’s a shell based application that corrects previously typed errors in your console commands. By default you have to type fuck into your console each time you’ve made a mistake. But they’ve also introduced a wonderful instant mode.

When I first heard about this tool, I laughed, I thought it was a good gimmick, but honestly after using it for months I don’t know how I used a terminal without it. It is probably one of the best command line helpers that I have.

Installing the library

Depending on what your machine uses there are many different commands.

OSX / Mac use homebrew ( or via linuxbrew on linux )

brew install thefuck

On Ubuntu / Mint, install it with the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools
sudo pip3 install thefuck

On FreeBSD, install it with the following commands:

pkg install thefuck

On ChromeOS, install it using chromebrew with the following command:

crew install thefuck

On other systems, install it by using pip:

pip install thefuck

Setting up the alias

Once the library is installed onto your machine you will need to setup an alias. This can be done in any of the following files .bash_profile, .bashrc, .zshrc or any other start up scripts on your machine.

eval $(thefuck --alias)
# You can use whatever you want as an alias, for those who don't like to swear:
eval $(thefuck --alias duck)

To verify that the library is now installed reload the terminal that you are using and type the following.

fuck --yeah