Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

I tried this and a handful of alternatives a while back, but would often get frustrated because they’d jump to something different than what I intended or were missing some directory I wanted.

Eventually I came up with an alternative using fd¹ and fzf². I have a variant of this in my .zshrc:

  function n {
    cd "$(fd . "${HOME}" --type d --color never | fzf --select-1 --query "${*}")"
    ls
  }

Call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories. If you do `n <argument>`, it’ll start the find with `<argument>` already filled in (and if there’s only one match, jump to it directly). The `ls` is optional but I find that I like having the contents visible as soon as I change directories.

In my personal setup I’m also including iCloud Drive while excluding the rest of the Library directory³ as that is too noisy. I have a separate `nl` function which searches just inside `~/Library` for when I need it, as well as other specialised `n<char>` functions that search inside specific places that I use frequently.

¹ https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

² https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

³ Change the fd command to: fd . "${HOME}" "${HOME}/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs" --exclude '/Library/' --type d --color never

Yes, I made a similar keybinding for xonsh, using fd and fzf. I press Alt-c, and fzf shows me all the subdirectories rooted where I'm at.

That's a good intermediary solution. But the one that totally changed my flow was to combine autojump[1] and fzf. autojump is similar to Z (this submission). It stores all the directories you've visited in an SQLite DB and can show them to you (ordered by visit frequency) with a command line argument. So I pipe that to fzf.

Now I can extremely quickly jump to any directory I've been to before - it really helps that they're sorted by visit frequency. I honestly use this more than any other approach - and I probably go for days on end without using the usual TAB autocompletion.

[1] https://github.com/wting/autojump

In most shells, you can just add those entries as shell completions to `cd` or `z`.

In fish for example, it's as easy as the following (using zoxide query)

    complete -c z -f -k -a "(zoxide query -l)"

I don’t just want specific directories to autocomplete. Whatever I navigate to is likely something I never even opened but was generated by a script and I now want to do manual changes to the contents. This approach makes for me the rare case as usable as the common one.

Hey thanks! I've been wanting something like this for ages, and didn't really think about combining fzf with fd.

I've tweaked it to search a lot less folders (depth 5) and to restrict to a pattern beginning by X...

    cd "$(fd "^${*}" "${HOME}" --max-depth 4 --type d --color never | fzf --select-1 --query "${*}")"

This makes it super snappy. I probably have waaay too many folders with similar names.

Same reflex. As much as I appreciate full depth, I realize I really have many deep trees and it makes things laggy.

ps: out of fun, I wanted to toy with fzf --multi mode

    function zzg {
        local selection="$(fd . "${HOME}" --type d --color never --max-depth 4 | fzf -m --query "${*}")";
        local term="xterm"
        for dir in $selection
        do
            "${term}" -title "zzg({$dir})" -e "cd ${dir} && bash" &
        done
    }

I was frustrated with jumping to frecent directories, so I "reverted" back to jumping back to bookmarked directories [0] (which I find much more predictable).

0: https://github.com/techwizrd/fishmarks

This seems pretty great! I love tips like this.

I'm going to try out a version of this now.

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