ZSH is my favourite shell, and while it comes with a lot of features out of the box and is even more powerful with oh-my-zsh that does not mean that my daily workflow can not be improved even more. A situation I’m facing often is to switch between multiple directories. While the autojump plugin exists I have to admit that I dislike to type the necessary prefix. Hence, the shell function link was created:
function link() {
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
target=$(basename `pwd|tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"`)
else
target=$1
fi
echo "alias $target='cd $(pwd)'" >>~/.zshrc
}
Append it in your ~/.zshrc and use it as follows:
If you do not provide a command line argument, the directory’s name will be used. Otherwise the given argument is chosen for the alias. Do not forget to reload your shell configuration if you want to try this in your current session.
Update 2018-09-10 Reddit user wjv stated that a better approach might be to use zsh’s directory hash (link), i. e.
hash -d beautiful="~/very/long/name/for/something/Beautiful”
While this approach uses zsh internals, it does not work as well for me since I have to type the ~ character which is not easily reachable on my keyboard layout.