Is it possible to write a symbolic link such that no matter where am I on the file system, I can use for example project to point the directory home/me/project? I would like to use commands like cd project, nano project/file1.tex and so on.  Do I have to write a symbolic link to all of my directories?
How to define a symbolic link that I can use in all of my directories
bash;symlink
Most shells have a CDPATH variable that cd can lookup for directories to  change to in the same way that executables are searched in $PATH.So if you add your symlinks in a ~/projects directory and do CDPATH=~/projects, you'll be able to do cd foo to go in ~/projects/fooWith zsh, if $var contains a path you can do cd ~var to cd to that path. The useful part of that is when your prompt has %~ which then reflects it in your prompt:$ proj1=/usr/local proj2=/etc/apache2$ PS1='%~$ '$ cd ~proj1~proj1$ cd ~proj2/sites-enabled~proj2/sites-enabled$With setopt cdablevars, you can also do cd proj1 instead of cd ~proj1.