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how is this different from using aliases?

It's different in that it's less cumbersome to maintain and that you can do more with the bookmarks than just 'cd' to it. For example, some other commands that are included are lsbm, mvbm and cpbm, which allows you to resp. list the files in a bookmark, and move or copy files to a bookmark. It's overall a lot more flexible and easier to extend common commands.

Is forking lots of common commands really less cumbersome to maintain than just using shell aliases or `expansion`?

EDIT: By forking, I mean "having to maintain separate frontends to", not the process startup overhead. (That's obviously inconsequential.) E.g. if I want to use a shortcut for a default path to clone a git repository from, then I would need gitbm. Etc.

The forking is not noticeable on today's machines; especially on this rather small scale. And yes, I would say that typing "cd `bm log`" is more cumbersome than typing "cdbm l". cdbm does pretty much the same behind the scenes anyway (with some error and argument checking), so why worry about that one extra mini process?

As noted above, I meant forking in the "fork a project" sense, not the fork(2) call.

I'm being a bit nitpicky, though, so I'm going to let it go.

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