Jorge Dias

For a long time I’ve used my own command alias to navigate through my work related projects and jump to them using the cx

Originally the x comes from Xing where I worked at the time. It also happens that the letter x is located next to the c which makes it very convenient like cd.

Anyway imagine you’re in any directory on your system and you want to change to ~/development/work/boring-project normally you’d do something like:

cd ~/development/work/boring-project # or
cd ../../boring-project

Now this can get very tiresome depending where you are and having to get right how many directories levels to go up, etc. Fortunately for us we have the CDPATH environment variable.

We could set in our bash_profile

export CDPATH=~/development/work

and then in our previous example we could have just done cd boring-project.

If we had a directory foo in our current path and a project named foo in our CDPATH in that case you’d be taken to project foo which may not be what you want. So some people recommend to set the CDPATH like:

CDPATH=.:~/development/work

Now in my case I don’t want to change the default behaviour of the cd command so that’s were my cx command comes in.

You can copy this into your bash_profile.

# Change to match your needs
export CXPATH=$HOME/development/work

cx() {
    CDPATH=$CXPATH cd $@
}

_cx() {
    CDPATH=$CXPATH _cd
}

complete -o nospace -F_cx cx

With this when you type cx you’ll get autocompletion too for the projects in your CXPATH regardless from where you are.

Enjoy!