I recently got into Arch Linux via EndeavourOS. I’m trying to find a way to remember all the Pacman and Yay commands, but I’m not able to find a good approach to remembering most of the commands.

Does anybody have any mnemonics to help with this? For example, how did you remember that Yay -Yc was the command to remove all unneeded dependencies?

  • @somenonewho@feddit.de
    5•7 months ago

    Gotta agree with Ozymandias aliases are the way to go.

    I’ve set up a few different aliases “search” which is just pacman -Ss “install” (pacman -Sy) “update” (pacman -Syyu) “remove” (pacman -Rns) and finally as to your question about unneeded dependencies I’ve got “clean” which first does an orphan check/clean (pacman -Qtdq | pacman -Rns -) and afterwards also cleans the package cache (pacman -Sc) Also the aliases are automatically prefixed with sudo (if it is installed).

    This way I simply run update and afterwards clean and my system is up to date and cleaned of orphans.

    I’ve created these aliases back when I was still using 3Distros (Arch,Debian/*buntu, Fedora) so my alias definition comes after a little script that determines the correct package manager and, depending on that, sets the aliases. But that’s of course only necessary if you use different distros and want your aliases to be portable.

    Tl;dr: Set up aliases for things you wanna do often. Check the wiki for reference if you only want to do something every so often.