I've had some feedback from users that bors r+ is hard to use and remember. They have asked for something like bors merge or bors test. I agree that r+ is inscrutable unless you love Bors.
I was thinking I could create a list of aliases for commands in the bors.toml file, so as to avoid polluting the bors codebase with piles of aliases.
I'd almost rather just add bors merge as a built-in alias and call it good.
The problem with project-specific configuration, even though I know we can't avoid it entirely, is that it makes it harder for maintainers that work on more than one bors-based project. I've already seen people trip over it because they simultaneously work on homu-based projects and bors-based projects, and the differences between them are really minor. Having bors-ng based projects inconsistent with each other would be even more annoying.
Strong +1 here for adding "merge" as an alias for "r+" and "merge=foo" as an alias for "r=foo". That feels to me like a good match with "try" and "retry" as full words, too.