Quickly navigate your filesystem from the command-line

Note: The discussion on Hacker News contains many helpful suggestions for improvement (e.g., tab-completion, usage under MAC OS X) and alternative tools. I will incorporate these into this post as soon as possible. Follow me on Twitter if you want to be notified of any updates.

Like many others, I spend most of my day behind a computer. In order make the most of it (and to keep my body from complaining too much), I try to maintain an optimized setup. For example, I code in Vim, browse with Vimperator, and move windows around in i3. Another common task is filesystem navigation. I prefer to use the command-line for this, but typing cd ~/some/very/deep/often-used/directory over and over again does become cumbersome.

Automated tools like autojump and fasd address this problem by offering shortcuts to the directories you often go to. Personally, I prefer a more manual solution, which I would like to share with you. I have noticed quite an increase in efficiency with this, and perhaps you will too.

Under the hood this manual solution comes down to storing symbolic links in a hidden directory (e.g., ~/.marks). There are four shell functions jump, mark, unmark, and marks, and they look like this:

export MARKPATH=$HOME/.marksfunction jump {cd -P $MARKPATH/$1 2>/dev/null ||echo"No such mark: $1"}function mark {
 mkdir -p $MARKPATH; ln -s $(pwd)$MARKPATH/$1}function unmark {
 rm -i $MARKPATH/$1}function marks {
 ls -l $MARKPATH | sed 's/ / /g' | cut -d' ' -f9- | sed 's/ -/\t-/g'&&echo}

Put this in your .zshrc or .bashrc and you're ready to jump. (I have also turned this into a plugin for oh-my-zsh called jump, but that's currently in a pull-request.) To add a new bookmark, cd into the directory and mark it with a name to your liking:

$ cd ~/some/very/deep/often-used/directory$ mark deep

This adds a symbolic link named deep to the directory ~/.marks. To jump to this directory, type the following from any place in the filesystem:

To remove the bookmark (i.e., the symbolic link), type:

You can view all marks by typing:

$ marks
deep -> /home/johndoe/some/very/deep/often-used/directory
foo -> /usr/bin/foo/bar

That's all there is to it! If you like what I had to say then you may want to follow me on Twitter.