nav

Create shortcuts for navigating to specific directories.

Dependencies

This script requires realpath which is usually missing from MacOS.

Homebrew

brew install coreutils

Installation

Note that this script needs to be sourced directly so that it can change your current working directory.

$ git clone https://github.com/kaybinwang/nav.git
$ cd nav
$ echo "source $(pwd)/nav.sh" >> ~/.bash_profile

Usage

You can use nav to create shortcuts to directories that you visit often.

$ nav add df ~/personal/projects/dotfiles  # create a new shortcut
$ nav to df                                # navigate to the shortcut

You can also manage your shortcuts using nav update and nav remove

$ nav update df ~/personal/projects/dotfiles  # update the shortcut
$ nav remove df                               # delete the shortcut

Finally, you can see what shortcuts you have defined by using nav list.

$ nav list

Please refer to nav help for more documentation on the commands.

Configuration

By default, nav stores your shortcuts in ~/.config/nav. However, you can set your own custom directory by setting the NAV_PATH environment variable. For example,

export NAV_PATH=/path/to/shortcuts
source /path/to/nav.sh

Testing

We use shellspec for testing. This is because it can execute the tests using sh instead of bash which gives us higher confidence in our portability. Furthermore, the framework lets us directly test shell functions instead of requiring executable scripts.

We also run tests inside a docker container. This is because the tests have side-effects on the filesystem that we would like to isolate from our local machine.

You can execute the following command to run tests locally.

$ make test

ARM Issues

Note that shellspec currently doesn't have an ARM image which causes runtime errors when running the tests. This can be fixed by building the image from source directly.