Flagbox - a 2-keys bookmarks written in bash

Did you ever see those typed commands in a terminal before? Whatever your answer, I am convinced that you find it ambiguous and not friendly-user. You are right: Flagbox was not conceived with friendly-usage in mind. It was conceived for user efficiency. For this purpose friendly-user aspect was not a priority during Flagbox conception. If you are searching a tool which allows you to make a similar job with a more friendly usage, you can go to the Credit section. Most of them inspired the creation of Flagbox.

Flagbox is a mark manager. It allows you to save the directory you are in and jump it later.

Basic usage

Saving a directory is easy. If your Flagbox settings are default settings, when you launch your terminal you have an empty box. Type ? to see your current box content:

Here Flagbox is saying that your current box is empty. After entering , and typing ? again, you can easily understand that the , mark is used for the directory where you entered ,.

Now if you are changing directory (exemple: /tmp directory) and you are typing ,, you will come back to the directory pointed by , mark. Full comma aliases are used by Flagbox to save directory and jump it later. By default, you can save up to 3 marks in a box (,, ,, and ,,, marks). You can change this setting later.

What now if you want to erase a mark that you will not use anymore? Flagbox generates resetting aliases for this purpose. Let's assume that your current box is built with the following content:

Resetting a mark is a bit tricky but really easy to use when you understand the mechanism. To reset a mark you have to build a string composed with ? and , characters. A comma means "keep the matched mark" and a question mark means "reset the matched mark". For the above box, if you type: ?,? you will:

1. reset , mark,
2. keep ,, mark,
3. and reset ,,, marks

Why? Because for the first and third alias' indexes, you placed ? characters.

Now that you know how to save a directory, delete a mark, use a mark and list marks you defined, you have enough background for a basic usage of this tool. If you want to learn about advanced features, you can read the documentation

Installation

Flagbox will source a script. This script will generate aliases described in the documentation, will build 1 function and will define 1 environment variable (1 associated array) in your current shell. If this specification is not respected, please open an issue, I will fix it. If it is OK to integrate this specification in your workspace, here are the steps:

1. git clone https://github.com/pabtomas/flagbox.git
2. copy flagbox/sourceme.sh where you want:

cp flagbox/sourceme.sh ${WHERE_YOU_WANT}

3. sourceme.sh generates aliases in the shell where it is sourced so you have to put this line in your ~/.bashrc or your ~/.bash_aliases (which should be sourced in your ~/.bashrc):

source ${WHERE_YOU_WANT}/sourceme.sh

Contribution

I would be very grateful for anybody wanting to contribute anything. Here are the instructions.

Credit

• huyng's bashmarks
• twerth's bashmarks