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Comment by plopz | Hacker News Reader

The problem I find with the current ES modules is a lot of statements like this

import {thing} from '../../../thing/in/dir.js'

and then if I move a file I have to change all of its imports to a different number of parent traversals. It would be really nice to be able to define a path that all imports would be relative from.

I think babel has something like this using @, but I don't use babel right now.

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There are proposals being debated for this. The article mentions specifically this one: https://github.com/domenic/package-name-maps

Ember has a convention to resolve files in its 'app' directory from your project name, and it makes renaming files a lot easier: `import { thing } from 'my-project/thing/in/dir.js'`

RequireJS has this too.

Moving files around is not something you do all that often. Doing so will present a problem in most any programming language.

This is really not true. Moving files around is trivial in anything with a decent type system and IDE.

I wrote a very small resolve hook for node that does this. It makes the directory of the initial module / for all imports. Node has made resolver hooks like that dead simple.

You an usually use `NODE_PATH=src` which will make requiring anything inside `src` easy as `import something from 'somewhere';`

You can set a custom alias, for example nuxt uses ~ for project root. I've seen projects use @ also.

That's not part of the ES module spec. That's something transpilers (like Babel + a plugin) support.

Can you also teach systems with their own resolution about the aliases (Jest, Flow, etc.)

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