Saturday, March 1, 2014

Autojump: A neat command line utility that saves me tons of time

Autojump is a really neat utility that complements the cd command very nicely. For instance if I have a folder called "my_project", I can just say "j project", and the auto jump command will directly jump to this directory (wherever it is in my filesystem).

How does it work?

Autojump tracks how much time you spend in your command line on a specific folder. And builds a weight chart. So, if you have spent enough some time in your my_project directory on command line, and you say "j project", it will check its registry and jump to the highest match. And, the best thing is you don't even need to specify the full name. Partial names work!

Autojump in action

Install zsh. And install autojump. You will see a super productivity increase on command line.

Platforms Supported: Linux and Mac.

To install on Mac:
brew install autojump
And then copy the single line printed by brew install into your .bashrc or .zshrc file. After that go to command line, cd into a directory. Then cd to some other directory. And type "j ". You will see it work! 

Thanks to my colleague Ankit Dhingra for introducing me to auto jump. Goodbye to cd aliases.

Related Links:
https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump