6 min. read

As a programmer or someone who spends a lot of time in command line shells, it’s likely that you regularly move around directories in ways that might feel less than efficient. Especially if you often visit the same directories every day.

The routine probably goes a bit like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 cd ~/Development ls # look around... cd project # whoops, never mind, let's go back... cd .. # time to start something new... mkdir new_project cd new_project # need to check something in that other directory... cd ../project

Maybe with a bit more experience, you have some tab-completion tricks up your sleeve to avoid typing these full directory names, so in reality it looks more like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 cd ~/Dev<TAB> ls # look around... cd pro<TAB> cd .. mkdir new_project cd new<TAB> cd ../pro<TAB>

Great. You saved about 20 keystrokes. That’s commendable. Yes, you could also use the return value from the mkdir command to immediately move into the newly created directory ( cd !$ ). And you could just remember that project/ is nested inside Development/ so that you don’t need to ls around to find your way. The reality is that people are not computers and memorizing your entire directory’s tree structure is a trick that only impresses people who far too much time on their hands.

But what about this?

1 2 3 4 5 6 j d j p cd .. mkdir new_project cd new<TAB> j p

The most obvious benefit is that this took 18 fewer keystrokes to accomplish the same goals but what may not be so obvious is that the j d (or j dev , j develop , etc.) command will now take you to ~/Development/ and j p to ~/Development/project from anywhere inside your filesystem. So this relatively small gain in typing efficiency will compound with time.

1 2 3 4 cd /usr/local/lib/something/log/ j p pwd ~/Development/project

How does it work? AutoJump

AutoJump is magic cape that lets you fly around directories in your command line. The official description of the tool is “a faster way to navigate your filesystem” — but that doesn’t quite do it justice. It a bit of an undersell. My completely made up estimate is that Autojump has saved me from at least a whole year of typing. At the very least that’s how it feels.

How Autojump works

This command:

1 2 j project /Users/olivierlacan/Development/project

Works just the same as this command:

1 2 j p /Users/olivierlacan/Development/project

Why? Because AutoJump remembers all of the directories you move into with the cd command or with its own j command. And more important, AutoJump does fuzzy matching. Meaning it will look for a directory you’ve visited before that contains the same string of letters you provide, even if you only provide one letter.

What if you have two directories that start with the letter p ? That’s where it gets interesting.

The first time you type cd directory_name , Autojump logs the absolute path to that directory and assigns it as weight (or rating) of 10.0 .

So if you do:

1 cd /var

You will see the following in the j -s command ( s stands for “stats”):

1 10.0: /var

What if you visit /var again?

1 14.1: /var

And so on. If you visit a directory often the rating for that directory will increase. In my case, you can easily guess what I spend most of my time doing by looking at my top 5:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 j -s ( ... ) 234.7: /Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/campus 262.7: /Users/olivierlacan/Development/rubyheroes/rubyheroes.com 417.4: /Users/olivierlacan/Development/perso/orientation 874.1: /Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/CodeSchool ________________________________________ 10810: total weight 198: number of entries 0.00: current directory weight data: /Users/olivierlacan/Library/autojump/autojump.txt

Since both my first ( CodeSchool ) and fourth ( campus ) directories contain the letter c . How does AutoJump decide where to go? Once again, the rating.

Since campus has a much lower rating, AutoJump will first take me to CodeSchool . However, if I repeat the j c command, it will try the next highest rated directory that matches the letter c .

1 2 3 4 j c /Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/CodeSchool j c /Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/campus

If you don’t like to fly blind and assume AutoJump will make the right choice for you, it’s also possible to see what directories match a specific string of letters you provide:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 j c<TAB><TAB><TAB> $ j c__ c__1__/Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/CodeSchool c__2__/Users/olivierlacan/Development/cs/campus c__3__/Users/olivierlacan/Development/perso/keep-a-changelog c__4__/Users/olivierlacan/Development/perso/olivierlacan.com $ j c__4 /Users/olivierlacan/Development/perso/olivierlacan.com

After display a numbered list of directories that match the supplied argument, AutoJump will prefill the command j c__ and let you type the number for whichever directory you which to jump to.

Advanced Features

the jc (child) command will scope the search to only subdirectories of the current directory, which is very useful to find nested log directories.

(child) command will scope the search to only subdirectories of the current directory, which is very useful to find nested directories. the jo (open) command will open the matched directory in your operating system’s file manager.

(open) command will open the matched directory in your operating system’s file manager. the j -i command will increase the weight of the current directory.

command will increase the weight of the current directory. the j -d command will decrease the weight of the current directory.

command will decrease the weight of the current directory. the j --purge command will wipe the weighted list of directories AutoJump relies on if you need to start from scratch.

Installing AutoJump

While AutoJump does require Python, it’s such a simple tool supported by most shells (bash, zsh, fish) that you can install AutoJump via many Linux package managers. For macOS I recommend Homebrew’s brew install autojump which couldn’t be simplier although do remember that you have to source AutoJump in your .bash_profile or .zshrc by adding the following line:

1 [ -f /usr/local/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh ] && . /usr/local/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh

It checks that the AutoJump script is available and simply loads it in your shell.

You can also clone the git repository and use the manual installation procedure if you want to stay on the bleeding edge but it’s an incredibly stable tool thanks to its simplicity. I don’t think I’ve encountered a single bug in years of usage.