Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronlund | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering if any of you use alternatives or hacks for the cd command?

I've been testing out a couple of different ones, like xd, fcd, wcd and pushd/popd, but I'm not quite sure which I should commit to or if there are better ways :)

View on HN

Few from my aliases file that may help:

   7   │ alias ..="cd .."
   8   │ alias ...="cd ../.."
   9   │ alias gcd="cd (git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

The first two should be self explanatory.

The third one will take you to the "git root" of a directory structure, i.e. the top-level folder where the .git directory is (I find this grounds me for when I'm doing git commands.)

Here's another that I use daily: https://github.com/clvv/fasd

You can even combine that with the aforementioned `fzf`: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/examples#with-fasd-1

I can recommend pazi as a convenient tool for zapping around https://github.com/euank/pazi

The readme also lists several alternatives in the same space as pazi.

Nothing fancy. I simply use the Zsh dirstack (with auto_pushd) so 'cd -' instead to be limited to the previous path only like in Bash, can be expanded with Tab to one of the last DIRSTACKSIZE path.

The dirstack can also be saved to a file and reused on the next session.

Then I've stolen the "up" function somewhere to cd to a specific level using a part of the path when I'm deep in a FS tree.

Finally, not limited to cd only, Zsh can also expand paths with only the initials of the dirs, so 'cd /v/c/a/aTab' is expanded to 'cd /var/cache/apt/archives/', usually with less typing required on Bash...

I use z [1], it builds up a list of folders you visit based on frequency and lets you quickly jump into them by fuzzy-searching it. Z also has tab completion allowing you to cycle through the matches. See project's home for examples of its work at the link below.

[1]: https://github.com/rupa/z

Thanks guys. This is great stuff :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com