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Ask HN: Would filesystem bookmarks be useful in your shell workflow?
4 points by manux81 13 days ago | 2 comments
I’m experimenting with a small shell utility for filesystem bookmarks, and I’d like to understand whether this is a problem other people have.

The idea is to define persistent or temporary bookmarks for directories:

``` bm add work ~/Work bm temp build /tmp/build ```

and then use them directly in paths:

``` cd @work ls @work/project ```

The utility would also support renaming bookmarks, promoting temporary bookmarks to persistent ones, demoting them, and clearing temporary bookmarks.

I’m not sharing the implementation yet. At this stage, I’m mainly interested in how other people handle this today:

* Do you use aliases, environment variables, shell functions, z, autojump, or something else? * Would explicit names such as @work be useful, or would they feel redundant? * Would temporary bookmarks be useful in real workflows? * What would this need to offer to be worth using instead of existing directory-jumping tools?



> The idea is to define persistent or temporary bookmarks for directories:

  be add work ~/Work
  bm temp build /tmp/build
> and then use them directly in paths:

  cd @work
  ls @work/project
How is that different from, and improve upon

  ln -s ~/Work @work
?

Also, how are temporary bookmarks improvements on

  export build=/tmp/build

?

I've just been using this for years https://github.com/rupa/z

It is simple and does the job