I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages. I can’t even remember most git flags, I’m ecstatic when I remember how to iterate over arrays in “jq”, I can’t fathom how people remember these types of syntaxes.

I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.

At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.

That said, the OP's commands are useful, I am copying them (because obviously I won't ever memorize them).

I don't, I will google things and fiddle, then put it in a git alias (with a comment on what it does and / or where I got it from) and push it to my private dotfiles repo, taking it with me between computers and projects.

jj's template and revset languages are very simple syntactically, so once you're comfortable with the few things you do use often it's just a question of learning about the other existing functions (even if only enough to know to look them up), which slot right in and compose well with everything else you know (unlike flags which typically have each their own system).

Or, perhaps better yet, defining your own functions/helpers as you go for things you might care about, which, by virtue of having been named you, are much easier to remember (and still compose nicely).

You research it once, use it and then remember that it has "ancestor" in the command somewhere and then use ctrl + R to dig up something from your shell history.

So, how does one iterate over an array in jq? Asking for a friend.

> I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages.

We can't.

Why do you think the `man` command exists?

Some things are idioms that one repeats so often they just stick, e.g. I use "grep.... | cut -c x-y | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr" to quickly grep frequency of some events from a log file.

Don't feel bad - no one remembers them all, we just remember a few idioms we use...

Same, but now with AI I don't have to remember that anymore

If I look something up twice, I record it in Obsidian. If I need it more than a couple of times, I'll probably make an alias, a script or a mask [1] file. Autocomplete and autosuggest are essential to my workflow. And good history search.

[1] https://github.com/jacobdeichert/mask

Nobody does. One person figures it out, then writes a blog post, and we all Google for it. Even git’s man pages are long and sometimes cryptic.

Yeah especially with git. All I know is pull, add, commit, push. Everything else I have to look up.

You add them into your GIT config file as shortcuts?

If you have multiple machines (/must have), just apply your user config to current machine?

If you don't have to codedive new projects all the time, there's zero reason to memorize these. If your job is to look at new codebases all the time, you probably learn to remember these commands pretty quickly.