Faster Way to Change Directory on Linux/macOS

As developers, we spend a lot of time working in the command line, and we change directories frequently. Procedures that we do frequently are worth optimizing, in this post I'll introduce a tool I wrote that might help you save more time changing directories.

Suppose that in your daily development routine, you often need to switch between the following directories:

cd ~/go/src/github.com/pingcap/tidb
cd ~/go/src/github.com/pingcap/tidb-binlog
cd ~/projects/redis
cd /tmp
cd /usr/local/Cellar

Without any tool, the best you could do to save some typing is to use .. or shell history. But we can do better.

I rewrote autojump in Go and created the tool shonenjump. With this tools, once you have entered the previous directories once, they would be saved in a data file, and then we can access them quickly:

j tidb # Jump to ~/go/src/github.com/pingcap/tidb
j go git tidb # Jump to ~/go/src/github.com/pingcap/tidb
j tm # Jump to /tmp
j Cell # Jump to /usr/local/Cellar

If you are interested to improve your productivity, please give it a try, it can be easily installed and uninstalled with Homebrew on macOS.