Do not ship/provide any aliases by default, i.e. remove all builtin aliases

[granbay]

Do not ship any aliases by default, i.e. no builtin ones. For example st for status, desc for describe, ...

Here are some arguments for not shipping aliases by default:

• Everyone who wants an alias can put it in their config. Adjusting the TUI to your needs and preferences is exactly the point of having a config.

• Aliases or abbreviations are often personal taste and workflow dependent, e.g. st is for someone status, for another diff --stat, for yet another split -r "trunk()". For some is ci commit, for others is it continuous integration. Often aliases provide different "defaults value/flags", e.g. p for push but pa for push --all, pf for push --bookmark feature

• People who don't want an alias in their setup have a hard time as removing an alias is difficult (maybe even impossible? I couldn't find anything on this).

  In contrast adding an alias is easy for those who want it.

• Aliases interfere with tab completion, for example desc -> describe. (How exactly completion works is obviously shell, framework and config dependent but the gist is the same.)

  Notation: | is the cursor position

  Without aliases:

  $ jj de<tab>
  $ jj describe | # space after name
  

  However, with the alias desc -> describe

  $ jj de<tab>
  $ jj desc| # no space
  

  Often this is accompanied by a menu to allow choosing between desc and describe which, well, is not a really a choice since they do the same and thus is more an annoyance than helpful.

  Moreover, to get to the position where the revision can be typed, an additional <space> must be pressed. Therefore, the "shortcut" desc is actually a "longcut" 4-5 keystrokes with aliases compared to 3 without alias.

• Tab completion is usually better suited for shortening commands, subcommands, and arguments. It not only works for some prefix but all unique prefixes, e.g. de, des, desc, descr, ... all complete to describe. Some mechanisms even provide fuzzy completion or more.

Related:
#3581

[josephlou5]

as removing an alias is difficult (maybe even impossible? I couldn't find anything on this).

Correct, it is impossible. jj config unset only works to unset values explicitly set in a user / repo / workspace config (depending on the flag given), but all files in cli/src/config/*.toml are compiled into the binary directly:

jj/cli/src/config/README.md

Lines 1 to 2 in d372bab

	These files are compiled into the binary; they are not installed to the user's
	system.

The only solution would be for the user to override any built-in alias they don't want and do something else with it, such as:

$ jj --config 'aliases.ci=["ci-alias-is-unset-try-something-else"]' ci
error: unrecognized subcommand 'ci-alias-is-unset-try-something-else'

Usage: jj [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

For more information, try '--help'.

Great points about tab completion being weird; I hadn't thought about those before.

Obvious but worth mentioning: Removing any / all of the built-in aliases will be a breaking change, but should be quite easy for users to fix once they update.

I also think this doesn't apply to any of the clap-defined aliases, such as obslog for evolog, op for operation, or any of the single-letter jj bookmark subcommand aliases. For example, when I do jj o<TAB> (with dynamic completions), it completes to the full jj operation, and jj bookmark <TAB> doesn't suggest any single-letter aliases, so seems like clap can be smart(er) about it.

[yuja]

Related: #3594

There's an ugly hack to override a table value, but I don't recommend it.

[[--scope]]
aliases = 0  # reset table by assigning non-table value
[[--scope]]
aliases.foo = []