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by Thomas Wheeler.
Original Post: Quick Change Directory for Bash under Cygwin
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I think about half the commands I type in a Bash shell must start with "cd ....". Since the Windows filesystem is inherently broken by design (http://secretgeek.net/ex_ms.asp) and pathnames can get pretty long anyway, this involves a lot of repetitive over-and-over recurring again and again typing of the same identical equal paths.
Doing the same thing more than once often presents an opportunity for automation. (See if automation will save you time first. Also consider whether your effort to automate something will help others. Then go ahead and automate it anyway, because you know you want to.)
Thinking I must not be the first person to have this thought, I did a bit of Googling and quickly found autojump.
Basically, autojump just remembers every directory you "cd" to, and you can then quickly jump to it. E.g. "j aut" instead of "cd /c/Users/Thomas/Projects/autojump". Five characters beats the heck out of 37.
Pluses: It just works, with very little cognitive overhead. After a few days of use, my fingers and brain are already starting to build a "muscle memory" of a few directories. I don't have to think about typing "j ..."; it just happens.
Minuses: It doesn't handle paths with spaces. There'll be no jumping to /c/Program Files/.... There's also a tiny-but-noticeable delay when you "cd" to a directory; it takes a while to spin up the Python interpreter. (Yes, it requires Python, so you'll want to make sure you have that installed.)
Installation is simple; I cloned and installed according to the instructions (I used the "--global" option to install under /usr).
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