Here's an old thing I don't remember if I explained -

For using the terminal, you can set a different 'path' variable for the 'cd' command. So instead of having to 'cd' starting from the directory you're in, you can, for instance, 'cd' directly to anything in your home directory, even if your pwd is elsewhere. Here's what I have in my .zshrc:

export CDPATH=~

Since I put a symlink to every repo in the home directory, then i can switch to them from wherever I am. zsh even does a pretty aggressive auto-complete matching, which makes it even easier.

Some related tips - zshell has auto-ls, which will automatically ls when you change to a directory