No more zip files gunking up your downloads folder. Just extract and delete all at once
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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yuck ill keep that in mind ty
When playing with large files using a terminal emulator and CLI software is usually better. The tools are often much more fully featured and faster, extracting specific files from archives and so on is very easy via the command line.
I hate having to cd places and type in longass filenames full of underscores tho :/
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Tab completion? Don't name files like that? Use scripts to rename them? use a qmk keyboard or low level script to make typing underscores easier?
And I'm supposed to run a script to rename every zip I download? I do have qmk compatible keyboards but I'm not really seeing the use case here. It just seems like for file managers, clicking on icons is easier? Less keystrokes at the least.
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I have everything named consistently on my computer and part of that is a program watching my downloads/sort directory and renaming everything that lands in it by removing capitals and replacing spaces or underscores with hyphens.
Mostly I just use tab completion/regex/patterns, qmk can be used to e.g. replace space with underscore when you switch layers and switch back after like 0.5 seconds without typing. Makes it fast to write underscores for programming etc.
I find taking my hands off my keyboard and having to switch programs from terminal slows me down massively, and most serious computer users (e.g. job is professionally use a computer) in the linux space I have met feel the same which is why I trained myself to use consoles well.
If you're slow and not interested in getting more practiced use whatever, the software for guis are just factually less featureful/composable and much less performant is all.
Wow that sounds kinda rad, I sure wish I knew how to just write a script or conjure a program or whatever.
Dunno what "regex/patterns" is here or how to use qmk for any of that, but I know about completion, in fish it shows what it'll autocomplete if you press Right Cursor Key which is neat.
Oh you are so barking up the wrong tree, I'm just some idiot who hates windows enough to have switched. I like the terminal and think it's chill for a lot of things, but the poor state of graphical archivers on linux does bite. Maybe if I were gigabrained and lived nearer to silicon valley I'd have learned to use terminal for everything correctly and become much cooler at computers.
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The cool thing is that you can learn! Python is approachable and shell is an extremely simple language so you could pick either. It's more straight-forward to use shell as you can use all the lovely existing programs by just writing their name, no need to manage libraries/call out to stuff.
sed 's/_/-/ text_with_underscoreswill replace underscores with hyphens for example in the text. so one part of a script renaming everything would be`for filename in *
do
NEWNAME=sed '/_/-/ $filename
mv $filename $NEWNAME
done`
off the top of the dome so maybe a mistake in it.
expansion patterns are stuff like the asterisk above, it matches any character any number of times. So e.g. prefix_* matches all strings that start with prefix_. Regex is a language for describing strings and performing operations on them, you can do stuff like ask for "the string that has 3 letters, none of which are Z, followed by a number between 2 and 8 at least once, then anything. Output a string made of the number, then the rest of the string"
Very powerful for finding and manipulating text, and since all linux software takes text as arguments and outputs text extremely useful for sophisticated software chains (when you compose things with pipes in console to get complex behaviour from simple software).
There is always this learn-to-code but never any specificity.
`for filename in *
do
NEWNAME=sed '/_/-/ $filename
mv $filename $NEWNAME
done`
Hexbear's formatting sucks for copypasting code, that's like pretty simple though I guess.
Ah my beloved
LOAD "*",8,1, that's a classic, I see. Much ado about computer programs...ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!
If you do want your computer to be more comfortable then rather than the nebulous "learn to code" learning to script (simple programs that run from top to bottom) to automate annoying or repetitive tasks is a really good way.
I am biased, I started as a system administrator and learned to program that way (now I'm an ok programmer, slow but I try and make very robust programs that are performant).
On my computer I have a /home/rat/bin/ folder on my PATH variable (that determines how console evaluated "programname command" type entries, it looks on the PATH for programname and invokes it) that I fill with little half baked helpers for myself.
Just yesterday I decided I needed something to remind me to stretch, so I added a little piece of code (literally just "notify-send 'Take a stretch break'") and added a systemd timer unit to call it 20 minutes after boot and twenty minutes after that. There's lots of ways I could improve it (pause when inactivity, overrule DnD, add pausing functions, add a systray applet thing) but no need to start with all that and no need to dive right in to some bloated piece of crap bundling electron for something that just increases how much I stretch.
You'll probably have stuff you do often: clearing out old downloads, searching for files in a particular directory, opening a set of programs together, switching between night and say brightness and volume, renaming stuff, setting up folder structures and so on. If you find yourself repeating something you can ask "Is there a way to just have this happen automatically?"
Linux's POSIX (mostly) compliance makes it really easy because you can just start by going "I guess I'll chain my most common commands together" and worry about adding arguments/error recovery/logs etc if it's ever relevant.
I've done 'rename every file in x folder manually' and I didn't know how scripting, but I knew it would be cool to have. Thanks for chatting in response to my frankly silly bullshit though.
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