Mounting Folders as PSDrives

I’ve found a trick that makes working with multiple git repositories a breeze! Did you know that powershell has this nifty feature called a PSDrive? It’s a low-level abstraction upon which things like Get-ChildItem are built and it’s the power behind working with both directories/files as well as things like registries. With this feature, we can mount individual folders and expose them as if it is a full-fledged hard drive within our system.

For example, on my computer this blog’s repository is checked out to:

> C:\dev\blog

Therefore anytime I wanted to access it I would need to first remember where I put it and then cd: into that directory

> cd C:\dev\blog

Could there be a better way? I think there is!

I opened my powershell profile

code $profile

Then I added a new PSDrive to alias my repository path

# Create a new "Blog:" drive pointing at the folder on my file system and don't write that process to the host
New-PSDrive -Name "Blog" -PSProvider "FileSystem" -Root "C:\dev\blog" | Out-Null

Now when I want to edit my blog the command is as simple as

> cd Blog:

… and the best part is that I don’t have to remember where I parked! And if I ever need to change it (or move in on a different computer), I can just update my alias and all my habits and muscle memory still work.