Have you seen how zsh adds this functionality to plain cd? $ pwd /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex $ cd usr usr/local $ pwd /usr/local/share/texmf-dist/tex

Have you seen how zsh adds this functionality to plain cd? $ pwd /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex $ cd usr usr/local $ pwd /usr/local/share/texmf-dist/tex Edit: there is also a directory stack, and you can set zsh to always push the current dir to the stack. Then you can do cd -4 to go to the directory you were in four cd's ago.