February 7, 2026
Comma-nding attention
Start all of your commands with a comma
A tiny comma is fixing command chaos — and the crowd is screaming “why didn’t we do this”
TLDR: A developer’s hack—prefixing personal commands with a comma—avoids name clashes and makes them easy to find with Tab. The crowd went wild with praise and puns, splitting into Team Comma enthusiasts and selective adopters worried about typing fatigue, turning a tiny keystroke into a big conversation.
One keystroke just stole the show: a developer suggests putting a plain comma at the start of personal commands so they never clash with built‑in ones. Translation for non-geeks: your custom shortcuts won’t get mixed up with the computer’s, and you can hit Tab to see your list. It’s simple, fast, and weirdly satisfying.
The crowd went loud. One top comment gasped that it’s “so simple and elegant” and immediately useful, while another cheered “brilliant!” and a third applauded the short, no‑nonsense writing. But the plot twist? Not everyone wants to go all‑in. Some fans say they’ll use it only for less‑frequent scripts, because typing a comma every single time might get annoying. That tiny punctuation mark has sparked a mini culture war: Team Comma vs. Team Underscore, after one jokester bragged, “I start all my underscorends with an underscore.” And then there’s the viral meme take: “,Start all of your commands with a comma” — a copy‑paste slogan begging to be a sticker.
Beyond the jokes, the stakes are real: with thousands of preloaded commands on modern systems, name collisions are a headache. The comma neatly sidesteps them, no Shift key, no tech gymnastics, just type comma, hit Tab, see everything. It’s the kind of tiny trick that makes power users purr — and everyone else wonder how a dot’s chiller cousin just won the day.
Key Points
- •The article proposes prefixing personal command names with a comma to avoid collisions with system commands.
- •The author observes Debian-based systems have many commands, increasing collision risk, with an example count of 21,733 entries in /usr/bin on Ubuntu via apt-file.
- •Many unshifted characters are unsuitable due to shell or filesystem semantics; comma has no special meaning and works in filenames.
- •Comma-prefixing keeps custom commands distinct and remains easy to type without using the shift key.
- •Tab completion enables quick discovery of comma-prefixed commands by typing ',' followed by the tab key.