Via Allan Odgaard, a simple and super useful terminal tweak. The cd command looks for a CDPATH environment variable, which specifies directories cd will always look at when trying to change directories. Essentially, what PATH is to executing programs, CDPATH is to changing directories.

The upshot of this is you can always change to commonly used directories no matter where you are in the filesystem. For example, I use the following setting:

export CDPATH=::~:~/Work:~/Desktop:~/Code

and now no matter where I am in the filesystem, I can always change to any subdirectory of my home directory (or ~/Work, ~/Desktop or ~/Code). So, entering cd Downloads will bring me to ~/Downloads no matter where I am.