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Comment by xmdx | Hacker News Reader

I wish I would chain things in the navigation alias.

For example if I set the following alias:

    alias hello = '~/Docuemnts'

It would be nice if I could then execute hello/world to take me to ~/Documents/world but it requires hardcoding.

Guess I could play around with functions and arguments to solve this.

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I think I might be able to help with this one! Here's a little trick I learned from a friend. It's also tab completable.

I keep all my code in ~/code

$ c # cd to ~code

$ c pr<tab> # tab complete to c projectname

$ c projectname # cd to ~/code/projectname

This is pretty simple in zsh

# c to cd to ~/code

c() { cd ${CODE_DIRECTORY}/$1; }

# tab complete c against code

_c() { _files -W ${CODE_DIRECTORY} -/; }

compdef _c c

(Note: CODE_DIRECTORY is just an env var for ~/code)

I use this all the time and I use h to do the same for my home directory

https://github.com/gpspake/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/gpspake/...

No need for an alias, a variable (I think that's what they're called) will do:

    hello=~/Documents

Then:

    cd ~hello/world

Or omitting `cd` (requires `setopt auto_cd`):

    ~hello/world

And with `setopt cdable_vars`:

    hello/word

This also works with tab completion:

    hello/<TAB>

With ZSH, you can use a named directory hash to create such 'aliases' to directories:

    hash -d hello=~/Documents
    ~hello/world

The shortened names also show up in your PROMPT if it is using %~ to display cwd.

fish abbreviations kinda do this, for example if you define your alias above as an abbrev and you type hello<space>, it replaces hello by ~/Documents in your command line. You still have to press backspace to remove the space you just inserted, but it's better than nothing.

Also, apparently you can add this to zsh with a plugin: https://github.com/momo-lab/zsh-abbrev-alias

fish-shell abbreviations are really cool, I do miss that in zsh, I'll probably give that plugin a go. It also makes it for other people easier to see what's going on when looking at the previous commands.

add hash command in your $zshrc

  $ hash -d hello=$HOME/Documents
  $ cd ~hello/world && pwd
  /home/user/Documents/world

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