A friend of mine showed me Fish Shell, a shell replacement for Mac and Linux. One of its coolest features was a “quick directory switcher” that lets you jump to directories you’ve previously visited in that session.
Feeling left out I decided to write dirswitch.el, a directory switcher for M-x shell
, Emacs’s built-in shell mode (see Running shells in Emacs: an Overview.)
Like Shell’s M-r
history search functionality (which works much like isearch) dirswitch.el will record directories you visit and let you rapidly switch between them by pressing C-M-n
and C-M-p
.
It’s still a rough prototype but it’s a hallmark example of what a few hours of Emacs hacking can accomplish.
You can get it from my Github and it’ll probably appear in a package manager near you soon.