AUTOJUMP

A `cd` command that learns

One of the most used shell commands is cd. A quick survey among my friends revealed that between 10 and 20% of all commands they type are actually cd commands! Unfortunately, jumping from one part of your system to another with cd requires to enter almost the full path, which isn't very practical and requires a lot of keystrokes.

autojump is a faster way to navigate your filesystem. It works by maintaining a database of the directories you use the most from the command line. The jumpstat command shows you the current contents of the database. You need to work a little bit before the database becomes usable. Once your database is reasonably complete, you can "jump" to a commonly used directory by typing:

j <dir>

where <dir> is a few characters of the directory you want to jump to. It will jump to the most used directory whose name matches the pattern given in dirspec. Note that autojump isn't meant to be a drop-in replacement for cd, but rather a complement. Cd is fine when staying in the same area of the filesystem; autojump is there to help when you need to jump far away from your current location.

Autojump supports tab completion starting with bash v4.0+.

Pierre Gueth contributed a very nice applet for freedesktop desktops (Gnome/KDE/...). It is called "jumpapplet", try it!

Thanks to Simon Marache-Francisco's outstanding work, autojump now works perfectly with zsh.

Usage Examples

j music

would jump to /home/user/music/, if that's a commonly directory traversed by command line.

autojump music

displays the directory autojump would jump to if invoked.

jumpstat

displays a listing of tracked directories and their respective weights. For example:

...
54.5:  /home/shared/misc
60.0:  /home/user/Dropbox
96.9:  /home/user/code/autojump
161.7: /home/user
Total key weight: 1077

The "key weight" reflects the amount of time you spend in a directory.

Authors

Joel Schaerer (joel.schaerer (at) laposte.net)
autojump applet: Pierre Gueth
zsh support: Simon Marache-Francisco, William Ting
installation: Daniel Jackoway, William Ting, and others.

License

autojump is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

autojump is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with autojump. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Requirements

Python v2.6+ or 3.0+

Installation

Automatic Installation

Linux

autojump is included in the following distro repositories, please use relevant package management utilities to install (e.g. yum, apt-get, etc):

Debian testing/unstable, Ubuntu, Linux Mint

On Debian only, autojump requires manual activation for policy reasons. Please see /usr/share/doc/autojump/README.Debian.
RedHat, Fedora, CentOS
ArchLinux
Gentoo
Frugalware
Slackware

Mac

Homebrew is the recommended installation method for Mac OS X:

brew install autojump

A MacPorts installation method is also available.

Other

Please check the wiki for an up to date listing of installation methods.

Manual Installation

Grab a copy of autojump:

git clone git://github.com/joelthelion/autojump.git

Run the installation script:

cd autojump
./install.sh [ --local ] [ --zsh ]

and follow on screen instructions.

Use --local to install into current user's home directory.

Use --zsh to install for Z shell.

Manual Uninstallation

It is recommended to use your distribution's relevant package management utilities, unless you installed manually or ran into uninstallation issues.