Scott Hanselman

Jump-Location - A Change Directory (CD) PowerShell Command that reads your mind

September 19, 2014 Comment on this post [25] Posted in Tools
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There's a lovely little utility called autojump for *nix consoles that makes the 'cd' command very smart. More that just auto-completion, it's a kind of "auto guessing." Hence, autojump. There is some beginning Windows support, but instead I turned to Tim Kellogg's open source PowerShell implementation "Jump-Location."

What a joy.

j this and j that

First, I was like "jump-location?" I'm not going to type that. But then, of course, duh. Aliases.

Jump-Location is aliased to just j, which means I can now do awesome stuff like this:

c:\> j sc
c:\users\scott> j g
c:\users\AppData\Local\GitHub> j des
c:\users\scott\Desktop>

But there's more. It's actually watching how long you are in a directory and keeping stats. You can see the weighted stats with "jumpstat" and the "database" is just a text file in ~\jump-location.txt.

If "j d" isn't enough to get me into C:\GitHub\DisProject then I can do "j g d" and I'm there. It's amazing.

Installation is easy, and I hope it gets on PsGet soon for even easier installation. Just unzip, unblock, ensure that your PowerShell execution policy allows scripts, and run ./install.ps1.

NOTE: Don't run install from your desktop, or a temp folder. Put the Jump-Location folder somewhere where it will live, and it's going to add a line like this to your user profile ("C:\Users\YOU\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1")  like this, so you'll want to install from a final path:

Import-Module 'C:\Users\Scott\Dropbox\utils\Jump-Location-0.5.1\Jump.Location.psd1'

I'm excited about this great little utility. Head over to https://github.com/tkellogg/Jump-Location and STAR it in GitHub, and give it a go! Tim, the author, is on Twitter at @kellogh. Other contributors include Sergey Vorobyev.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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September 19, 2014 1:01
Didn't know about PsGet, will install first thing tomorrow. So far I've used a homemade script backed by a file containing aliases to directories and alias autocompletion, but that jump thing looks more maintenance-free.
September 19, 2014 3:21
Very disappointing.
It appears that the .zip doesn't contain the necessary .dlls.
Trying to build the project in VisStudio 2013 is equally problematic -- necessary nuget packages aren't updated, and even when they are, the project doesn't build.
Like I say, very disappointing.
CB
September 19, 2014 3:28
CB - I just downloaded https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumplocation/files/latest/download and the DLLs are in there.
September 19, 2014 4:16
I'm getting the error that the DLL can't be loaded as well, though it is there.

Import-Module : Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\users\[someguywhoreadshansleman]\OneDrive\Powershell\JumpLocation\Jump.Location.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not
supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)
At C:\users\[someguywhoreadshansleman]\OneDrive\Powershell\JumpLocation\Load.ps1:14 char:2
+ Import-Module $dllpath -Global -DisableNameChecking
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Import-Module], FileLoadException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.IO.FileLoadException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.ImportModuleCommand
MR
September 19, 2014 4:21
Oh well, not Scott's job to debug. Off to Github.
MR
September 19, 2014 5:03
I personally use Go, available on PsGet. It's not really the same thing, but it's about as useful and more predictable.

Basically it's bookmarking for directories. So I'll type 'go db' to go to c:\projects\database or 'go de' for c:\users\[username]\desktop etc. I had to set up these 'bookmarks' manually but I only have maybe half a dozen and they rarely change.
September 19, 2014 6:14
Just added a Chocolatey package for it - https://chocolatey.org/packages/Jump-Location
September 19, 2014 8:10
MR - this implies that you either didn't unblock the zip, or that PS execution policy is off.
September 19, 2014 8:47
Hmm I remember using using similar a while ago, it was called Z, it has a PsGet package.

https://github.com/vincpa/z

Has anybody used Z before, how does it compares to AutoJump?
September 19, 2014 13:34
I suggest the alias "jlo", for getting a beautiful association each time you cd :)
September 19, 2014 16:33
The chocolatey install worked perfectly -- thanks Lee Harold!
CB
September 19, 2014 17:25
After running into some issues trying to install manually, I ran Lee Harold's chocolatey install and it was flawless. Thanks for that!
September 19, 2014 18:00
This is great! Thanks for sharing it. And thanks Lee for making the chocolatey install.
Rob
September 19, 2014 20:42
Nice job, Lee!
September 19, 2014 23:22
Lee, nice job with the Chocolatey package! Would you mind submitting a github issue or pull request to help automate the deployment to Chocolatey?
September 20, 2014 0:21
Nice writeup Scott, and great little package Tim! I had been using poshmarks (Powershell port of bashmarks), but Jump-Location just supplanted that in less than a full day of use.
September 21, 2014 9:48
Thanks for the tip - Jump-Location is very useful for me. I ran 'cinst jump-location' and everything worked. 'j' also has tab expansion among matches!
September 22, 2014 18:12
It's funny no one commented about Norton Change Directory. NCD was a nice little tool that was part of the Norton Utilities 4 (for DOS), back in 1987.
I think it was the father of all these little tools that make navigating through tons of folders a breeze.
Also, I think WCD (Wherever Change Directory) runs on both Windows and *nix machines.
September 23, 2014 19:52
It also blows up posh-git autocompletion (which is awesome and magical and is all rainbows and unicorns), so it's out of my system, for now.

I'd rather use Windows Explorer and use the "ConEmu Here" right-click integration.

Note that the Chocolatey package doesn't uninstall properly and leaves the entry it created in the PS profile.
September 24, 2014 10:08
Thanks for share
tom
September 25, 2014 13:54
Thomas, I had the same problem with posh-git. Tried a couple of things that didn't work, what did work in the end was changing the load order to ensure posh-git loads after jump-location.

Just go to My Documents -> WindowsPowerShell and edit the "Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1" file in a text editor.

I just moved the jump-location lines to the top and restarted powershell. Hopefully that works for you too.
September 26, 2014 14:15
We use our project fully based on T4Scaffolding Template. So we have to automate this T4scaffolding template. So tried to execute powershell command but scaffolding commands not working. just like

"The term 'scaffold' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program"

Our requirement is to automate T4scaffolding and generated files move to another shared folder using junkin.

Please reply ASAP.

Thanks, JIVESH
September 28, 2014 10:40
Thanks Tim, Scott and Lee. Mind-reading and mind-altering stuff. That is the most impressive scripting command I've ever seen, it is most inspiring.
September 29, 2014 9:04
Are people using powershell rather than cmd.exe by default now? Any reason to still use cmd.exe?
Jon
November 18, 2014 23:00
I really like jump-location, quite handy.

I did find a bug in it. It doesn't properly handle folders with parenthesis in the name. It'll add it to the database but will throw an error when you try to use jump-location to navigate there.

Maybe some day I'll find the time to fork the source and fix that but not this day.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.