Here’s a cool tool: autojump, written by Joel Schaerer (thanks, Joel). I spend much of my day as a programmer navigating around in the linux filesystem. Built-in tools like ‘pushd’ and ‘popd’ are nice, as are subprocesses — e.g.
(cd ~/Download && wget http://somewhere.com/path/to/file)
… and when it finishes downloading, I’m still in the directory I was in before the download was started.
Now there’s autojump to add in to the mix. After I ‘cd’ to various directories, later, I can type ‘j Down’ to cd to my Downloads directory. Very convenient. I just wish it were built into every distribution of linux.