d command in oh my zsh

I use zsh as my primary shell and have Oh My Zsh which has lot of helpful plugins, themes and functions which make using the terminal easy. One neat command/alias I found out was when I typed d by mistake.

I got back a listing of all my previously visited directories.

    0   ~/Projects/foo
    1   ~/Projects/foo/bar/baz
    2   ~/Projects/foo/bar
    3   ~/Projects/foo/baz
    4   ~/Projects/foo/baz/baz
    5   ~/Projects/foo/spam
    6   ~/Projects
    7   ~
    8   ~/Projects/eggs
    9   ~/Projects/foo/eggs

And I typed a number and was magically transported to that directory.

But it is all magic only till the trick is exposed, right? All I had to do was do a little bit of googling to find that the d alias was powered by a built-in command called dirs.

Looking at the the source code of the directories.sh plugin, I also learnt another neat trick.

I have always known that typing cd - would swap me between the previous directory and the current directory. Seems like the innocuous cd command has more options. You can type cd -2 or cd -3 and so on to jump to the 2^nd/3^rd previously visited directory. Now machines I don’t have zsh installed, instead of pushd/popd, I can easily do a cd -n.

Zsh/oh-my-zsh makes it all so easy. You should also try it instead of the old bash.