One of my favorites from the book is to alias "xdg-open" to "open" because I never remember the command. So now I can just type "open X" to open a file system location or file in a normal GUI program when needed. It is a small thing but I use it a lot.

Something that I didn't put in the book because I learned it only recently is the use of "notify-send", aka you can send yourself a system notification from the command line or script (at least it workd for me in Gnome). For instance once a task is finished:

> echo "when finished send notification" && notify-send "system notification"

Pretty cool if you ask me!