shell
Opt-Out Tracking is an Awful Idea
Someone invented a new standardized way to opt out of telemetry for command line applications. This is a horrid idea.
The existence of the setting establishes “tracking is OK!” as the default, and makes opting out the responsibility of the end user. With this in place, if a company collects the names of all the files in my home directory, it’s my fault for not tweaking some random setting correctly. (For technical types: don’t forget to set the “don’t track me!” variable in your crontabs, or else they’ll run with tracking enabled! Be sure to add it to your sudoers file, or now root commands spy on you!)
If this should exist at all, it should be in the form of a “go ahead and spy on me!” whitelist, with all telemetry and other spyware disabled unless explicitly enabled. Then it becomes the responsibility of each application’s author to encourage their users to enable it. Or better, get over the bizarre and radical notion of enabling spyware in command line utilities.
New favorite command: Zoxide
My favorite new command is zoxide. It’s like a faster z, autojump, or fasd.
In summary, it learns which directories you visit often with your shell’s cd command, then lets you jump to them based on pattern matching. In the event of a tie it picks the one you’ve used most frequently and recently. For instance, if I type z do then it executes cd "~/Library/Application Support/MultiDoge" for me because that’s the best match for “do” in recent history. An optional integration with fzf lets you interactively search your directory history before jumping to one.
It’s lightning fast and integrates perfectly with common shells (even Fish which is my favorite).
I didn’t even know I’d been missing a tool like this.