I mean, I do too, but people do actually take this kind of thing seriously. I’ve had several people say they wouldn’t use ripgrep because the command was too long to type, but upon hearing that the actual command was rg, were much more satisfied. Maybe I missed their facetiousness, but they didn’t appear to be joking…

For those of us with RSI, these little savings add up, and can make for a pretty big difference in comfort while typing.

My thoughts exactly. I have often wasted time trying to optimize something which took so little time to begin with, even if I reduced the time to nothing it would have no significant impact on overall performance. And the less-obvious trap is optimizations like this add additional complexity which leads to more time spent down the road.

All right, buddy. Cool.

Did I say it a “life saver”? Nope. Did I say it could save you a lot time? Yup. If cd'ing into directories doesn’t waste your time, cool. Move along, read the next blog post on the list.

I’m sorry about your roadmap estimations. Sounds like you’ve got a lot on your chest there.

the parent tool is probably overkill but a simple zsh function to jump to marked projects with tab completion is pretty awesome to have.

alias j="jump "
export MARKPATH=$HOME/.marks
function jump {
cd -P "$MARKPATH/$1" 2>/dev/null || echo "No such mark: $1"
}

function mark {
echo "mark name_of_mark"
mkdir -p "$MARKPATH"; ln -s "$(pwd)" "$MARKPATH/$1"
}

function unmark {
rm -i "$MARKPATH/$1"
}

#if you need it on another os.
#function marks {
#ls -l "$MARKPATH" | sed 's/  / /g' | cut -d' ' -f9- | sed 's/ -/\t-/g' && echo
#}

# fix for the above function for osx.
function marks {
\ls -l "$MARKPATH" | tail -n +2 | sed 's/  / /g' | cut -d' ' -f9- | awk -F ' -> ' '{printf "%-10s -> %s\n", $1, $2}'
}

function _completemarks {
reply=($(ls $MARKPATH))
}

compctl -K _completemarks jump
compctl -K _completemarks unmark

Important point: shells already have a lot of optimization for ‘cd’. (Not to mention pushd & friends, even!)

I worry about tools like the one mentioned in OP, which have fuzzy optimizations based on use, & therefore optimize specifically for well-worn paths. Our entire nervous system already optimizes our responses for well-worn paths; I feel like we ought to compensate for it, and avoid tools that try to keep us in a rut.

Since having two directories with similar names that are accessed almost equivalently often will produce far more typing with this tool (vs tab completion, which – at least in many shells – will only complete up to a divergence point on groups of files with shared prefixes, and therefore eliminates only unambiguously-wasted keystrokes, while working with every command), the rut-grade here is higher: not only do we use the same directories, but it becomes too much effort to have similarly named directories even when they are descriptive, and we must keep a mental tally of how often we visit particular directories with particular prefixes in order to estimate how many letters we should be using to cd! Every time we go into the wrong directory accidentally, we compound the error, and if we switch from one project (with associated directory) to another (with a similarly-named associated directory) we must spend time avoiding using this tool in order to re-train it.

No it’s not an exaggeration, because that’s not what I said. If you somehow miraculously move into a completely different set of directories every day while you work, I’m honestly impressed. You must do a lot of greenfield work.

I spend a lot of time in similar directories and sub-directories for the same projects. So this in fact, without exaggeration, saving me a lot of time. And cd'ing into these same directories and sub-directories is in fact a gigantic waste of my time.

It’s kind of amazing how you and some other commenters are focusing so hard on the number of characters I’ve used to demonstrate how much more efficient AutoJump is.

Did you use the tool? You spent about three times the amount of time it would take to install it to opine on the potential slowness it may have because it’s written in Python. It has a Bash version.

But yeah, we could count beans and figure out all the other potential bottlenecks in your workflow before we address this one. The thing is, this is my blog post about my workflow, and a bottleneck I’ve encountered a lot through the last ten years. I’m sure (from the reception) that it’s going to help a lot of people with similar problems.

But thank you for suggesting I’m not using my shell properly, that’s really helpful. :-)

I tend to agree. I spend much of my time switching between different systems that I don’t own, and every few months I get handed a brand new system with none of my previous customizations. Because of this I’ve taken the time to get comfortable with the defaults. I don’t have a bashrc, I don’t have a vimrc, I use screen instead of tmux because my machines don’t have tmux. And as it turns out, you can get a lot done with the defaults.

Then again these days I’m the kind of person who prefers default settings anyway… I had an Android phone that I would heavily customize and as soon as I got it how I wanted it, the developer would stop supporting a plugin for my launcher and now I have to do it all over again. I’d customize my Linux shell and then there’d be some new best thing (stop using screen, switch to tmux, stop using bash, switch to zsh) that I just had to install and switch my workflow to. I even switched to dvorak instead of qwerty because it’s better. But then I found I couldn’t use someone else’s machine, and they couldn’t use mine. And when I got a new one, it would take ages to get it set up again unless I learned even more tooling to save my configurations. Instead of doing work, I was fiddling with the tooling. All the time saved by the better tools cost even more time in configuration and learning a new workflow.

Over the years I’ve decided that it’s not worth it to me, and now I feel a zen-like calm knowing that I can log into any machine and all of my favorite tools will already be there.

That being said, I love the idea of this project, and past-me would have been all over it. Though the headline is a little hyperbolic I think there’s a target audience for it, even if I’m not part of that audience.

This comment is everything that’s right about this place.

I’ve exactly used this idea of wearing an official hat on a site I built. I’ve used it infrequently (low-traffic site), but I’m very glad to have it. It’s hard to remember that every comment I write somewhere will be the first, totally context-free thing someone has ever seen me say.

I quite like this idea. It reminds me of one of Quora’s best features, lending a level of credibility to the source without requiring some overblown bio.

Interesting idea yeah. As a lurker/member my votes reflect my personal opinion. When I respond to questions/comments/criticism of my work or company, it could be interesting to stand out as a credible source.

I think my point is that if I cared about whether those people had left their jobs or started new ones, I’d be following them on Twitter (or elsewhere) to see that level of update on an individual.

As far as things rising to the top in a vote based system; that’s somewhat true. However, we can start to set the tone of how these things are perceived by the community as a whole early on.