how to create environment variables recognized by OSX gui I use a lot of aliases in my ~/.bash_profile.. just to make my navigation easier and so on. 

I was wondering if I can make environment variables recognizable by OSX at a gui level.. for example if I open a finder window, and click ⌘g, I'd like to enter something like this


where $dev is defined as /path/to/my/dev/folder

ideas?
It's technically possible, but messy in recent versions of macOS -- see this stackoverflow question for details. But it won't do what you want, because the environment variable substitutions you're used to are done by the shell; most GUI inputs (like the Finder's Go To Folder command) are not parsed by a shell, so no environment variable substitution is performed. The Go To Folder operation in your screenshot isn't looking for a variable named "dev", it's looking for a folder literally named "$dev".