Windows cmd envrionment is hard to navigate. One thing that makes it inconvenient is the absence of a straightforward way of defining aliases. Let’s have a look at one solution.

I’d say at the beginning that there are more ways of doing this. I’ll share one that I currently use for about 15 or so aliases that I’ve defined for myself. If your needs are different, e.g. you need much more aliases, you might go for a different solution.

Let’s assume I want to use ls -la --color just as ll. The way I’d do that is as follows.

I’d set up a new folder right under C:\ and name it Aliases. This folder will contain one batch file per one alias. The name of each batch file will contain the alias itself plus of course the .bat extension. So in my example I’d create a ll.bat file inside C:\Aliases\ folder.

Then the content of the batch file will be simple in this case:

@echo off
ls -la --color

Last thing I need to do is to add C:\Aliases\ into PATH so the folder is searched when I type ll into the command line.

Another example could be when I want to use gc ... for git checkout .... The only thing I need to take into account here is how to allow for additional parameters to be passed from the command line into the batch file command. It solution could be:

@echo off
git checkout %*

Then I can go and type:

>gc master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

And it works as expected.

I’ve created a repository on my Github page where you can get more aliases I currently use.

Windows command line environment is not the most usable one I know. But there’re still ways of making it a bit more user-friendly and not as time consuming. Defining aliases this way is one way of doing so.