Tools for Testing — 2

Just like the first tool for testing ‘GraphViz’ I briefly described earlier, today’s tool is not limited to be used in testing.

In most of my projects, I use the command line a lot. My colleague Marcus Franke pointed me to autojump, which allows you to quickly navigate directory structures, as well as open folders in a GUI tool like the Finder (or Pathfinder) on a Mac (and I’m sure it works similarly on Windows & Linux).

As the project page says:

autojump is a faster way to navigate your filesystem. It works by maintaining a database of the directories you use the most from the command line.

I use a Mac (most of the time) as well as Homebrew, so the installation of autojump was simple:

brew install autojump

After using cd to navigate to my most visited directories to ‘train’ auto jump, I can use ‘j d’ to jump into my dev folder, which is where I keep all my project directories:

$ j d
/Users/stephan/dev
~/dev $

Yes, it’s just three key strokes: ‘j’, space and ‘d’. I like this quick way to jump between directories, because it’s a lot less typing (compared to entering the real path names) and moving back and forth in the directory structure is pretty easy and fast.

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