Is there a way to tell the shell (zsh preferably) about a command?

Question

I defined an alias:

alias school="cd ~/School/3BaFys/"

to quickly go to the folder 3BaFys which contains all of the directories I need this year.

Is there a way to tell zsh that when I do:

$school Num<TAB>

this expands to

$school Numerieke\ Methoden

where Numerieke \Methoden is a sub directory of ~/School/3BaFys/

eg, tell the shell what school actually does and enabling it the be smart?

Answer 1

Yes.

I just found this article describing how to do it.

Basically you rewrite your alias to a function, and then use some compctl magic on it.

This should solve your problem:

school() { cd ~/School/3BaFys/$@; }
compctl -/ -W ~/School/3BaFys school

Answer 2

Yes, but it might be more convenient to tackle the problem slightly differently.

setopt autocd
school=~/School/3BaFys/

Type the command line $school to change to that directory. Type $school/Numerieke\ Methoden to change to that directory, and you'll have completion on the Numerieke Methoden part (and on school, too) out of the box. And you can write things like xpdf $school/foo.pdf to access files in that directory without changing to it.

If you don't like polluting your parameter space, you can use a named directory:

hash -d school=~/School/3BaFys/
~school
ls ~school