Quick guide to setting up an shortcut/alias in windows

This is a quick 30 second guide to setting up an alias in windows. All this is applicable for windows.

Motivation

The main motivation behind this is that I wanted to simplify the ping command. So that I'll just type a single command and it'll execute the ping www.google.com -t, which I use to check if my internet connection is stable or not.
The motivation behind this post is that I couldn't find a quick guide/overview to setup alias or terminal shortcuts when I searched google. So hopefully this will be helpful to juniors to get started.

Open up a powershell and type away.

Basic alias by creating simple shortcut.

If you want to just create an alias for a command the script is like this.
If I want to reference the command echo using a shortcut like ec the command is like this

Set-Alias -Name ec -Value echo

Now the ec command will refer to the echo command, and the echo command is there as well, it didn't go anywhere. To try and see if this works you can try this

ec "Hello World"

Little bit extended - call simple commands with shortcut

To create the final alias, I'll have to use a powershell function like this.

Function PingGoogle { ping www.google.com -t }

Here the function's name is PingGoogle and it executes the ping www.google.com -t command. We can try it by just entering the PingGoogle command after pasting the method.

Now we'll have to make an alias to this command. Like this

Set-Alias -Name pingg -Value PingGoogle

Here the pingg alias is referring to the PingGoogle function. To test this we can just use pingg command now.

Bonus - How to persist these changes.

You'll notice that if you close your terminal then the changes go away, your shortcut won't work.
So to persist these changes across all terminals you'll have to save them in your terminal profile.

To do that type this

echo $profile

This will show you the location of your powershell profile file. Go to that location and open that file.
Or open that file with this

notepad $profile

A file will open in notepad.

Now paste your code in that notepad and save in the same location. Now what will happen is that every time your terminal runs it will also load codes from this file. That's why your changes that your pasted here will persist between sessions.

Reference

1. Microsoft Documentation
2. My own notes