Yes, that's a zsh feature.

Actually cd isnt a program. Your present working directory is managed entirely by the shell. If you type "type cat" in the terminal it will tell you its a program, but "type cd" says its a shell builtin. So yes, cd depends on the shell and zsh has some awesome quality of life features. This is not something you can do in bash.

And - to go back to where you came from.

BTW in case you didn't know, a bare cd without arguments will bring you to your home. I have alias setup to quickly navigate one or two directories up and print the path then:

alias ..='cd .. && pwd'
alias ...='cd ../.. && pwd'

Should works with every shell and I don't even need to type cd itself.

Each instance of . is a relative level to your current directory. ‘cd .’ changes your directory to your current directory. ‘cd ..’ (edit: on mobile this keeps changing to three periods but it should just be two) changes it to the directory above, ‘cd ….’ would change it to three directories above. This is standard in *nix (Unix and Linux) operating systems

Edit 2: this is very wrong

Awesome, I didn't know that either! TIL

I have a function called up. I do up X where X is the number of directories I want to go up.

up() {
  if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
    cd ..
    return 0
  fi
  local path i
  for (( i=0; i < $1; i++ )); do
    path+=../
  done
  cd "$path"
}

EDIT: Don't know if it's just me but if you see < it should be the less than character.

I use this all the time in zsh, and it’s one dot per directory up.

……… will go up 8 directories

cd is also optional in zsh, you can just type “..” without cd