One of your problems is that you executed your snippet in a separate shell process, which has no effect on the parent shell. It's the same problem as in How can I make environment variables "exported" in a shell script stick around?. You need to use the source builtin (also avilable under the name .) to execute the script inside the same shell.

source ~/.workspace-shotcuts.sh

Another problem is that you're trying to parse the output of ls. Don't do that. In shells such as sh and bash, you can get away with it because writing $projects outside of quotes splits the value at the newlines that separates the file names. Except that it doesn't actually work: for example, if the file names contain spaces, they will be broken into space-separated pieces. In a shell script, don't parse the output of ls, use wildcards instead. This is rather straightforward in zsh.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects; do …

What you're doing next is rather convoluted. You don't need eval here; using it only sets you up for quoting mishaps. Since you're using zsh, you can use the history modifier t to extract the last component of a path, without reaching for string manipulation constructs: $f:t. In case the file name contains special characters, you should protect them, and again zsh makes this easy thanks to the parameter expansion flag q: ${(q)f} gives you a quoted filename that you can use in the alias definition.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects
do
  alias $f:t="cd ${(q)f}"
done

But in fact, you're just reinventing cdpath plus auto_cd. Scratch all that and use

setopt auto_cd
cdpath+=~/Workspace

The auto_cd option lets you type a directory name to change into it, without having to type cd ‍ before it. The cdpath is an array of directory prefixes that cd foo tries if there isn't a subdirectory called foo in the current directory.

In case bash users see this thread: the alias method would be

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in "${projects[@]}"; do
  f=${f%/}
  alias ${f##*/}="cd '${f//\'/\'\\\'\'}'"
done

and the CDPATH method would be

CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Workspace
shopt -s autocd

One of your problems is that you executed your snippet in a separate shell process, which has no effect on the parent shell. It's the same problem as in How can I make environment variables "exported" in a shell script stick around?. You need to use the source builtin (also avilable under the name .) to execute the script inside the same shell.

source ~/.workspace-shotcuts.sh

Another problem is that you're trying to parse the output of ls. Don't do that. In shells such as sh and bash, you can get away with it because writing $projects outside of quotes splits the value at the newlines that separates the file names. Except that it doesn't actually work: for example, if the file names contain spaces, they will be broken into space-separated pieces. In a shell script, don't parse the output of ls, use wildcards instead. This is rather straightforward in zsh.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects; do …

What you're doing next is rather convoluted. You don't need eval here; using it only sets you up for quoting mishaps. Since you're using zsh, you can use the history modifier t to extract the last component of a path, without reaching for string manipulation constructs: $f:t. In case the file name contains special characters, you should protect them, and again zsh makes this easy thanks to the parameter expansion flag q: ${(q)f} gives you a quoted filename that you can use in the alias definition.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects
do
  alias $f:t="cd ${(q)f}"
done

But in fact, you're just reinventing cdpath plus auto_cd. Scratch all that and use

setopt auto_cd
cdpath+=~/Workspace

The auto_cd option lets you type a directory name to change into it, without having to type cd ‍ before it. The cdpath is an array of directory prefixes that cd foo tries if there isn't a subdirectory called foo in the current directory.

In case bash users see this thread: the alias method would be

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in "${projects[@]}"; do
  f=${f%/}
  alias ${f##*/}="cd '${f//\'/\'\\\'\'}'"
done

and the CDPATH method would be

CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Workspace
shopt -s autocd

One of your problems is that you executed your snippet in a separate shell process, which has no effect on the parent shell. It's the same problem as in How can I make environment variables "exported" in a shell script stick around?. You need to use the source builtin (also avilable under the name .) to execute the script inside the same shell.

source ~/.workspace-shotcuts.sh

Another problem is that you're trying to parse the output of ls. Don't do that. In shells such as sh and bash, you can get away with it because writing $projects outside of quotes splits the value at the newlines that separates the file names. Except that it doesn't actually work: for example, if the file names contain spaces, they will be broken into space-separated pieces. In a shell script, don't parse the output of ls, use wildcards instead. This is rather straightforward in zsh.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects; do …

What you're doing next is rather convoluted. You don't need eval here; using it only sets you up for quoting mishaps. Since you're using zsh, you can use the history modifier t to extract the last component of a path, without reaching for string manipulation constructs: $f:t. In case the file name contains special characters, you should protect them, and again zsh makes this easy thanks to the parameter expansion flag q: ${(q)f} gives you a quoted filename that you can use in the alias definition.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects
do
  alias $f:t="cd ${(q)f}"
done

But in fact, you're just reinventing cdpath. Scratch all that and use

cdpath+=~/Workspace

In case bash users see this thread: the alias method would be

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in "${projects[@]}"; do
  f=${f%/}
  alias ${f##*/}="cd '${f//\'/\'\\\'\'}'"
done

and the CDPATH method would be

CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Workspace

One of your problems is that you executed your snippet in a separate shell process, which has no effect on the parent shell. It's the same problem as in How can I make environment variables "exported" in a shell script stick around?. You need to use the source builtin (also avilable under the name .) to execute the script inside the same shell.

source ~/.workspace-shotcuts.sh

Another problem is that you're trying to parse the output of ls. Don't do that. In shells such as sh and bash, you can get away with it because writing $projects outside of quotes splits the value at the newlines that separates the file names. Except that it doesn't actually work: for example, if the file names contain spaces, they will be broken into space-separated pieces. In a shell script, don't parse the output of ls, use wildcards instead. This is rather straightforward in zsh.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects; do …

What you're doing next is rather convoluted. You don't need eval here; using it only sets you up for quoting mishaps. Since you're using zsh, you can use the history modifier t to extract the last component of a path, without reaching for string manipulation constructs: $f:t. In case the file name contains special characters, you should protect them, and again zsh makes this easy thanks to the parameter expansion flag q: ${(q)f} gives you a quoted filename that you can use in the alias definition.

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in $projects
do
  alias $f:t="cd ${(q)f}"
done

But in fact, you're just reinventing cdpath plus auto_cd. Scratch all that and use

setopt auto_cd
cdpath+=~/Workspace

The auto_cd option lets you type a directory name to change into it, without having to type cd ‍ before it. The cdpath is an array of directory prefixes that cd foo tries if there isn't a subdirectory called foo in the current directory.

In case bash users see this thread: the alias method would be

projects=(~/Workspace/*/)
for f in "${projects[@]}"; do
  f=${f%/}
  alias ${f##*/}="cd '${f//\'/\'\\\'\'}'"
done

and the CDPATH method would be

CDPATH=$CDPATH:$HOME/Workspace
shopt -s autocd