Issues

Behavior with no options.

Some people seem to want j with no options to behave like cd, (ie go to ~). I’m of the opinion that having it print out the dir list is more useful, as cd is firmly in muscle memory, j --l is annoying to type, and the list is useful for reference.

What i’ve done is alias jl='j --l' and it works pretty well. Feedback and reasoning for wanting other behavior is welcome, though.

Completion behavior

Tab completion works like this: j a b c<TAB> will complete on items that contain a, b, AND c out of the .j file. Hit enter and the first two arguments should be ignored.

By default, tab completes up to where a path stops being unique, and then beeps – a couple more tabs will show a list of completions. You might prefer to have tab cycle through multiple completions, by putting

bind '"\t":menu-complete'

in your .bashrc.

Speed

The part that runs during PROMPT_COMMAND should be as fast as possible. I ran some crappy benchmarks between this script and autojump, piping a file containing about 200 uniq dirs, each listed 10 times into the PROMPT_COMMAND part 4 times for each one. Assuming this a reasonable benchmark, j seems to have a slight edge:

~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./aj.py -a "$x";done

real	1m8.753s
user	0m46.907s
sys	0m19.745s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./aj.py -a "$x";done

real	1m9.950s
user	0m47.715s
sys	 0m19.973s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./aj.py -a "$x";done

real	1m9.860s
user	0m48.127s
sys	 0m20.537s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./aj.py -a "$x";done

real	1m11.415s
user	0m48.919s
sys	 0m20.673s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./j.sh --add "$x";done

real	0m57.965s
user	0m27.226s
sys	 0m28.994s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./j.sh --add "$x";done

real	0m58.909s
user	0m27.206s
sys	 0m28.974s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./j.sh --add "$x";done

real	1m0.295s
user	0m27.330s
sys	 0m30.398s
~$ time for x in $(cat input); do ./j.sh --add "$x";done

real	1m1.141s
user	0m28.046s
sys	 0m30.098s