Stop typing cd to navigate in your terminal - Mahesh Bansod

Introducing alternatives for easily navigating directories you’ve already visited. Prefer a reel over an article? here you go: instagram youtube

1. Going back to the previous directory

In standard shells - with cd is translated to $OLDPWD. So if you type cd - it will jump to the previous directory immediately!

Note that, this is different from .. which jumps to the parent directory.

Bonus for fish shell users

If you’re using fish shell, you don’t even have to type the directory name, you can just type where you want to go and press enter.

Examples:

$ ../some/path # enter to automatically `cd` in
$ - # moves to the previous directory
$ .. # moves to the parent directory

2. Going to previous previous directory

There’s unfortunately no standard way to do this with plain cd. You need to use the commands pushd and popd. The pushd command pushes the directory to the directory stack and you cd into it. The popd command pops the stack and you cd into the popped directory. So pushd twice then popd twice will land you to your original directory.

One would want to create aliases as follows but I would recommend that look into the shell specific section if you’re fish or zsh user.

alias cd='pushd'
alias cd-='popd'
alias cd--='popd;popd'
alias cd---='popd;popd;popd'

Shell specific features!

fish

Fish provides a shortcut to navigate between your previous/next directories! So you don’t even need the first tip of this article! Just type Option + Left or Right arrow key (Alt + Left/Right) to navigate previous / next directory.

The underlying commands these shortcut keys calls are basically prevd and nextd.

There’s also the cdh command that lists your recent directories.

zsh with oh-my-zsh

$ cd -2 # This will go back to the previous previous directory

3. Search through the history

Want to visit a directory that you’ve visited before but don’t remember or don’t want to type out the exact path?

Out of the box, you get reverse incremental search by pressing Ctrl+R.

This lets you search through your shell history for the commands you typed. This is an easy way to go to a directory in the history - though it’s a more generic solution - you can run any previous command you had run before.

Try out zoxide if it suits your workflow. It might solve all the problems we solve above easily. It automatically stores all your directory navigation history and lets you jump to any super easily.

Zoxide Github Repo

$ z project   # Smart jumps to ~/code/work/my-project
$ zi          # Interactive directory selection using fzf