Nice commandline directory bookmarker. (Saves you typing and tabbing too much)(bookmark-tools.com)

14 pointsby BjornWvor 17 Jahren15 comments

Nice commandline directory bookmarker. (Saves you typing and tabbing too much)

http://www.bookmark-tools.com/articles/1.html

8 comments

Hey! I'm the writer of these tools and was kind of surprised to run into it here, since I have not posted about this before — the submitter must have been an adventurous PyPI visitor ;)

This particular tool was mostly written to replace all the ad-hoc aliases and symlinks with something that could be easily maintained and brought to other commands (eg. cdbm, lsbm, mvbm, cpbm, etc.). To speed things up some more there's also tab completion and prefix matching, which is pretty convenient IMO.

BjornWvor 17 Jahren

Well, actually I was using cdbm and thought it might be nice to mention it on HN. Then I noticed you added some other interesting stuff as well, so even more reason to submit it to HN :)

So not an adventerous PyPi visitor, just someone who was looking throught his bookmarks ;)

Oh and thanks a lot for creating and sharing it. It's a great tool which IMHO should become part of the 'default' cd, mv and cp.

silentbicyclevor 17 Jahren

Instead of needing to have bookmark-aware commands in the first place ("commands that are available are and bookmark-aware: lsbm, cpbm, mvbm, mkbm, ...") , it would probably be better to use backtick:

   cd `bm shortcutname`

Forking loads of common utilities is going to add lots of superfluous complexity. Of course, at that point you could replace the whole bm suite with shell aliases or a script that contains

   #!/bin/sh
   # find relevant line by key, get the second field
   grep "$1 " ~/.bms | cut -d " " -f 2

. Put that in your path, chmod u+x bm, and there you go. In this case, the bookmarks file is hardcoded to ~/.bms and you edit it by hand, but that's probably good enough. If you want to add from the shell, here's bm-add:

   #!/bin/sh
   echo $1 $2 >> ~/.bms

Put it in your path, chmod u+x bm-add, good to go.

If you'd rather have the bookmark file separated by tabs, just remove the -d " " from bm, change the grep to "$1\\t", and change bm-add to echo $1\\t$2 >> ~/.bms. Simple.

For an excellent intro on how to work with Unix's strengths, read _The Unix Programming Environment_ by Kernighan and Pike.

bluishgreenvor 17 Jahren

I have these functions in my .bashrc

addpi() { echo "cd `pwd` $1" >> ~/.pi; echo }

pi() { `cat ~/.pi | grep $1`; }

Usage: when you are in a dir that you want to bookmark say addpi <name>

when you want to return to that dir from anywhere say pi <name>

Ofcourse you need some kind of resolution if you have 2 matches in the grep, but it works for me.

akkartikvor 17 Jahren

I took the next step in disambiguation: http://akkartik.name/bash.html#cd

iamalekseyvor 17 Jahren

There is also autojump http://wiki.github.com/joelthelion/autojump

joelthelionvor 17 Jahren

Autojump is awesome! (i'm the author ;-) )

DannoHungvor 17 Jahren

The blogging and animated gif stuff seems pretty out of place in this package...

stcredzerovor 17 Jahren

Actually, this is one of the things I used to use screen for.

vijaydevvor 17 Jahren

how is this different from using aliases?

char_pointervor 17 Jahren

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.

silentbicyclevor 17 Jahren

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.

char_pointervor 17 Jahren

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?

silentbicyclevor 17 Jahren

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.

CamperBobvor 17 Jahren

I've done this for years in my DOS sessions. A small program called qcd ("quick cd") reads the current working directory and writes a corresponding "cd" command to a batch file in c:\windows:

------------------

c:\foo\bar\bat>qcd 1

(creates file called c:\windows\1.bat containing "cd \foo\bar\bat")

c:\foo\bar\bat>cd \frotz\ozmoo

c:\frotz\ozmoo>1

c:\foo\bar\bat>