Dalia

A small commandline utility for creating shell aliases to change directories quickly without needing to type cd.

Configuration

Dalia requires a configuration file in order to run properly. The file should contain a list of paths, and any optional custom names, to create aliases for. All paths provided to dalia must be absolute paths, anything else is invalid.

Aliases can have a custom name assigned to them by surrounding them with square brackets ([ & ]) and including them at the beginning of the line. If dalia doesn't find a custom name for a particular directory, then the alias will be the lowercase basename of the path (e.g. /some/absolute/path yields an alias named path).

Sample Configuration File

[workspace]~/Documents/workspace
~/Desktop
[icloud]~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs
/Users/johnappleseed/Music
[photos] /Users/johnappleseed/Pictures

This configuration file will create the following aliases:

workspace='cd ~/Documents/workspace'
desktop='cd ~/Desktop'
icloud='cd '~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs'
music='cd /Users/johnappleseed/Music'
photos='cd /Users/johnappleseed/Pictures'

Installation

Install like any other Rust crate with:

$ cargo install dalia

Then, add the following line to your shell configuration file:

$ eval "$(/path/to/cmd/dalia aliases)"

This line will generate and output an alias command for configured directory in the current terminal session. It's a good idea to include it in whichever configuration file your shell runs at the start of each session so that the aliases are always available.

Customization

Dalia expects to find its configuration, in a file named config, in the directory ~/.dalia, but that location can be changed by setting the DALIA_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to somewhere else and putting the config file in there instead.