[robertcarter]

Can you provide some examples and/or the name of the packages etc. I've just started emacs and the way I use dired mode is too slow. In terminal I have a bunch of aliases for fast navigation. How do you do this in emacs?

[nandkeypull]

You can have aliases in emacs as well - just use bookmarks. Set a bookmark with C-x r m and jump to a bookmark with C-x r b (I bound this to a "bj" keychord to invoke bookmark-jump faster). If you install ido/helm/ivy, you'll have a quick fuzzy selection mechanism to grab whatever bookmark you want with just a few letters.

Plus you'll want to install a fuzzy file finder like find-file-in-project.

[yoplait_]

you need projectile to create projects (most of the time it's automatically inferred from the VCS) and helm-projectile to jump to any project file with fuzzy lookup.