Jmp: the superior cd

Ever used the cd command? You’ll never touch that outdated thing again when you try jmp. Navigate your filesystem with unprecedented speed, agility, and dexterity NEVER seen before.

• Given a set of regular expressions, jmp will intelligently search through your files and cd you into your intended directory.
• Supports blacklisting and aliasing for optimal search performance.
• Offers entire jmp suite for unmatched convenience.

We don’t live forever, so why waste a single second more of your life typing unnecessarily long paths?

Getting Started

In terms of dependencies, all you need is a working installation of Python 3. The scripts only utilizes standard libraries so no package installation needed.

Clone this repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/gholmes829/Jmp.git

Without changing folders from the place you ran git clone, run the following setup:

echo -e "SCRIPT_DIR=\"$(pwd)/Jmp\"\n\n$(cat Jmp/jmp_wrapper.sh)" > Jmp/jmp_wrapper.sh; \
echo -e "\nsource \"$(pwd)/Jmp/jmp_wrapper.sh\"" >> YOUR_TERMINAL_CONFIG_PATH; \
source YOUR_TERMINAL_CONFIG_PATH

where YOUR_TERMINAL_CONFIG_PATH is the path to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or whatever else you use that gets run upon opening a terminal.

If you ever want to uninstall jmp, all you need to do is remove the source <path to jmp_wrapper.sh> that gets appended to your terminal config file.

Basic Usage

Basic usage is as follows:

$ jmp expr_1 expr_2 ...expr_n

where each expr_i is a Python-compatible regex string (which includes basic text strings). The algorithm will perform a breadth first search from the specified search root and perform a cd upon finding a match. Take note of several details:

• By default, expressions are matched relative to the start of filenames
  • jmp a would match a and ab but not ba
  • You could easily jmp to somewhere ending with “a” with jmp ".*a$"
• By default, expr_n matches files in addition to directories
  • In the case of a non-directory match, it will cd you to the directory containing the matched file
  • If you want to only match directories, try jmpd, a simple alias for jmp -d

Blacklisting

If you don’t want to waste compute time on deep directories that you know don’t contain anything useful, you can use the blacklist. Any blacklisted term will not be evaluated. For example, adding "Documents" into blacklist.json prevents us from searching for or inside of the documents folder. This allows for a faster experience.

Aliasing

If you find yourself not wanting to refer to a directory’s name every time, you can use aliases. You can modify aliases.json to include a key-value pair that transforms your input. For example, adding "cc": "EECS 665" to aliases.json would make it so jmp cc gets interpreted as jmp EECS\ 665. This allows for shorter commands that get you to where you want.

Flags and Jmp Suite

Learn more about flags and usage:

$ jmp -h

Flags include:

• -b, --begin <str, path> set root of search
• -f, --file specify that files (rather than dirs) should be searched for
• -d, --dir specify that dirs (rather than files) should be searched for
• -l, --level <int, level> search will now run until match found or until max depth reached
• -s, --silent indicate that failure to find path should not print a message

Take note of the function variations/ aliases that come with the jmp suite:

• jmpa runs jmp using root as the search root
• jmps runs jmp using the first argument as the search root
• jmpf runs jmp and allows only files to be matched by expr_n
• jmpd runs jmp and allows only dirs to be matched by expr_n

Since a major point of jmp is for convenience and to save time, it would make sense to use jmpd rather than jmp -d, for example.

Tips and Tricks

If you excessively shorten your expressions, it is very likely you’ll end up in a lexically similiar location that is different from what you intended. Using multiple strategic expressions will conversely speed up the operation by narrowing the search space.

Considering the absolute worst case in terms of convenience, we can see that jmp converges to cd as each expression could be the next folder that you would need to cd to (e.g. jmp Projects Diviner core vs cd Projects/Diviner/core). In other words, jmp is at least as convenient as cd and has potential to be a lot, lot better. However, if you try to drop too much information, you may lose accuracy. Try to use the minimal number of expressions while still retaining substrings or patterns unique to your target location.

Optionally, you can rename the jmp command to something else. Setting alias dc=jmp in your terminal config file will now let you run dc D c (from the example above), where dc is now cd’s evil nemesis.

Desperately need a file but don’t remember the full name or path? Try jmpa ".*<snippet of name you remember>.*".

Deeper Customization

All jmp_wrapper.sh does is call and handle output from jmp.py. jmp.py is pretty succinct and modular, so it shouldn’t be too hard to modify the constraints for searching, matching, or even the traversal algorithm itself.

Contributing

Please feel free to reach out if you’re interested in contributing or have ideas for features!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details