The Z command line utility has saved me a ton of time. It remembers the directories you’ve visited and lets you jump to them with just a few characters. Almost like Chrome’s autocomplete for recently-visited directories (if you’re used to being able to type “g” to go to gmail or “n” for “news.ycombinator.com”...). For instance I can run “z B” and it’ll jump to my ~/Business directory (and “z ss” would do the same).
I couldn't do without a 'bookmarks' feature that I implemented for my terminal. It's triggered with `Alt+b`:
1. Scan an eternal history file for `cd` with absolute path except for /tmp/*
2. Sort and filter out duplicates
3. Call fzf and let user pick the desired result
4. Upon selection don't enter the directory but instead type `cd <selection>` into the prompt so that the user can navigate further using <Tab>.
What's nice about this approach is that it automatically builds your bookmarks, but only from `cd` commands where you deliberately used an absolute path.
Here's the code. It has some prerequisites (fzf[0] and ~/.eternal_bash_history[1]) and probably only works with my terminal (Xfce Terminal); it took a bit of tinkering to get it to work.
I prefer my own kd, which is 40 dead simple LOCs of shell and is predictable since it operates only on dirs you added (which sounds like a chore but is just fine in practice)
kd foo $PWD # stores as foo
kd f # jumps to foo
kd # in a Ruby project subdir, jumps up to where the Gemfile is
Just updated kd with a long-time feature I wanted: tty detection!
kd f # => jumps to foo
echo $(kd f) # => outputs foo's path
# some creative, if nonsensical, examples:
cp some/file $(kd foo)/app/controllers/whatevs
cp $(kd bar)/Gemfile $(kd foo)/Gemfile
kd foo && cd app/controllers && cp $(kd)/config/whatever .
This is useful and possible because kd's output is stable and predictable: it always returns the last prefix match of the kdrc file (or, without argument, the project's top-level dir), and it returns non-zero rc on failure. Plus zsh will even gladly expand the result on <TAB> for double checking.
This is one of those things I set up a decade ago and it's become such a part of how I use my computer that I'm confused for a moment whenever it's not there.
It's one of those rare tools that interacts with my stream of consciousness which is one step away from mind reading.
Hehe since i got to know 'cd -' which changes back to the last directory i did not miss this feature - but it sounds interesting, and i should try it out.
Instead of z, I use https://github.com/wting/autojump, which is written in Python. This has the benefit that you can call it from outside the shell, too.
Since I also love ranger as a file manager, I wrote my own integration of both: https://github.com/fdw/ranger-autojump . It remembers where I went in ranger, and I can also call autojump in ranger.
https://github.com/rupa/z