dir-alias: Create emacs specific directory shortcuts

Package motivation

This was originally made for EmacsPortable.App. EmacsPortable.App runs emacs off a usb or removable drive. When running an application off the USB drive, the directories will change based on the system running. For example, the usb may be on /Volumes/USB/ or /mnt/hda1/ or e:/. To make things consistent between platforms, this package creates abbreviated file names that should be consistent between every platform. In each case, this would be abbreviated to ~usb/.

After using this for some time, I found the abbreviations useful for many directories, and thought that others may also like the directory shortcuts.

EmacsPortable.App specific shortcuts

When using EmacsPortable.App, the following directories aliaes are setup:

Alias	True Directory	Directory Purpose
~ahk/	Other/source/ahk	AHK Sources Directory
~app/	App/	EmacsPortable.App Application Files
~ep/	.	EmacsPortable.App Directory
~ini/	Data/ini	EmacsPortable.App ini files
~nsi/	Other/source/nsi	NSIS Sources Directory
~pa/	USB Drive:/PortableApps	Portable Apps
~shared/	Data/start/shared	Shared Customizations
~site-lisp/	App/site-lisp	Site Lisp Directory
~src/	Data/src	EmacsPortable.App lisp source files
~start/	Data/start	EmacsPortable.App Customizations
~system/	Data/start/system	System-based Customizations
~usb/	USB Drive	USB Drive
~user/	Data/start/user	User-based Customizations
~h/	System Home Directory	System Home Directory

In addition to these aliases, the following aliases are also defined:

• All the directories in ~src/ are expanded into abbreviations. For example, if you had dir-alias in ~src/, the overall alias would be ~dir-alias/

General shortcuts

With or without EmacsPortable.App, the following aliases are added:

Alias	True Directory	Directory Purpose
~ed/	~/.emacs.d/	Emacs Settings Directory
~doc/	~/Documents	User Documents directory
~el-get/	el-get package directory	Main el-get package directory
~snip/	main yasnippet directory	Root directory of user-defined yasnippets
~git/	~/git or ~/github directory	Repository of git files
~org/	~/org directory	~org root

Creating your own aliases

Aliases can be created from environmental variables, or specifying them in your startup

Environmental variable aliases

You can setup variable aliases easily by just specifying them in dir-alias-env. For example, dir-alias sets up the following aliaeses.

(dir-alias-env "mydoc"
               "temp"
               "ProgramData"
               '("pd" "ProgramData")
               "ProgramFiles"
               '("pf" "ProgramFiles")
               "userprofile"
               '("up" "userprofile")
               "appdata"
               ;; "homepath"
               "systemroot"
               '("win" "systemroot")
               "localappdata"
               '("h" "ohome"))

For all specified environmental variables as strings, like “mydoc” or “temp”:

• dir-alias makes sure the environmental variable specifies a directory
• If the environmental variable specifies a directory, setup an alias for the environmental variable based on its name. For example “mydoc” would be aliased to ~mydoc/.

When the argument is a list instead, the first string represents the alias, and the second string represents the file environmental variable. For example =’(“h” “ohome”)= says that if there is an enviromental variable OHOME that has a directory that exists, setup the alias ~h/ to access that directory.

Whenever an alias already exists, ignore the new alias when using dir-alias-env. If you wish to overwrite any alias, you need to use dir-alias-env-force.

Note that these alias are setup at the time dir-alias is loaded. If these environmental variables change, they are not updated in dir-alias.

Manual aliases

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