Shell aliases are nice, but very shell specific. On my personal computers, I use the fish shell, but for work I use bash, so this is not really portable. As the need arose to simplify some of my command line one-liners, I opted for door two, which is a small program that implements command shortcuts.

The basic idea is to have an executable text file, where the shebang line invokes the shortcut program, and the contents are the shortcut specifications. Then just create a symlink to this file for every shortcut, add that to the PATH (or not), and, well, command shortcuts.

If that sounds like something you could use, check out the project page.