Quickly cd'ing to local git repositories

When I work on my laptop, almost exclusively that work happens inside of a Git repository. Working with Go, that usually means typing something along the lines cd ~/Code/Go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach. If you’re changing repos a lot, that can be annoying.

But it’s easy to optimize this a little bit, because usually you only have one copy of the repository on your file system.

With the help of the script below,

$ cd ~/Code/Go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
...
$ cd ~/dotfiles
...
$ cd ~/Code/tschottdorf.github.io
...
$ cd ~/Code/Go/src/github.com/jpetazzo/docker-busybox

turns into

$ gitcd cockroach
...
$ gitcd dotfiles
...
$ gitcd tscho*
...
$ gitcd *busybox

which is as efficient as it gets. I’ve topped this with

• alias gcd="gitcd"
• alias ccd="gitcd cockroachdb/cockroach"

to optimize even further. Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

function gitcd () {
  if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    return 1
  fi
  NEWDIR=$(find ~ -path "*/$1/.git" -a -type d -exec echo "{}/.." \; | head -n 1)
  if [ -z "${NEWDIR}" ]; then
    return 1
  fi
  cd -P "${NEWDIR}"
  echo "$(pwd -P)"
}

It doesn’t do much except for invoking find, looking for the first occurance of a folder that matches your input and contains a .git subfolder. If there is one, simply cd there. I’m sure somebody out there is already using something like this - it’s just so trivial but useful.

The original script (which may see some future tweaks as I find myself wanting them) is in my git-cd repository.