Maybe there is a tool that does that? Maybe I’m doing this all wrong and there is a different way I should browse?

  • quarrel4you@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    You may want to learn about the shell’s “history expantion” functions. as an example:

    ~$ ls ~/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012/2012-12-01.txt  
/home/tom/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012/2012-12-01.txt  

~$ cd !!$:h  
cd ~/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012  

~/Documents/tax_2012$ pwd  
/home/tom/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012

    Here the string “!!$:h” is basically the last command’s [ !! ] last argument [$], stripped of its last path component [:h].

  • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    Type cd then press Alt+. and it’ll copy the last argument of the previous command, make sure it’s what you want, and press Enter.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      Nice, I don’t remember having seen that before. I’m sure I’ll just keep using !$, because muscle memory, but I like seeing new approaches.

      • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        The shell, and lots of other things that take per-line input, use readline to do it. The readline man page is… extensive… to say the least. There are many more useful shortcuts in there, but I doubt anyone uses more than a fraction of them.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    If you’re using bash and haven’t modified the readline default, which is to use emacs keystrokes:

    $ ls foo/bar/baz

    Just what I wanted!

    Control-P Control-A Alt-D cd Enter

    • BonkTheAnnoyed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      absolutely brilliant <slow clap>

      You know, I always kind of wondered what happened when I accidentally pressed control C, control V or whatnot in bash.

      Level unlocked

  • usernameunnecessary@lemmy.zip
    0·
    22 days ago

    In addition to

    ^ls^cd

    I mentioned in another comment, I highly recommend you try “z”, installable on macos via “brew install z” (not sure if it’s available on linux package managers). Suppose you want to jump to ~/Desktop/project1/foo, you can just type “z foo”. It works without a full path, from anywhere, as long as you cd’d in there at least once.

  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    22 days ago

    What I do is: Up, Home, type cd , Delete (hold/repeat as many times as needed), Enter.

    The Home key instantly brings your cursor to the start of the command line (before the ls), even if the command is long enough to wrap.

    I’m not a terminal guru, and I don’t aspire to become one. I don’t want to memorize arcane symbols that each has a subtly different meaning, and I especially don’t want to execute them before I see explicitly what they’re going to do. So while the top comment of cd !$ is a perfectly good and correct answer, I offer this alternative in case you, like me, like to see what you’re doing as you do it. Home and End are pretty good.

    • abbadon420@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      22 days ago

      I had already found ctrl+a that brings me back to the front of the line. It’s bit more convenient for my hands than home.

        • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
          0·
          22 days ago

          Minor addition: I’ve had some shells where home will bring you back to the beginning of the current line, not the whole command. Ctrl+Home always brings you to the very start of the command if this applies to you

      • andyburke@fedia.io
        0·
        22 days ago

        ctrl-a: beginning of line ctrl-e: end of line ctrl-k: delete rest of line from cursor ctrl-u: delete line before cursor

        these are helpful in these situations, as well.

    • charokol@lemmy.zip
      0·
      22 days ago

      The seconds I’d save remembering which combination of dollar signs and exclamation points to use would never help me find a better job or otherwise improve my life. I’m okay with the up arrow too.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    0·
    22 days ago

    The soft option perspective (I see plenty of command-line-only solutions here already):

    These days, if I’m doing any major navigation, I do it the uncool way and use the GUI file manager bundled with my distro. I have the option enabled to show the “open a terminal at this location” button if I really want to start issuing commands.

    If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted. (It was possible to patch Win 9x to behave like earlier Win 3.x so that it stopped at the DOS prompt and didn’t load Windows, which fit my aesthetic at the time.)

    These days I prefer my comforts and I sure as heck don’t boot Linux to a command line unless something’s really wrong!

  • Noctambulist@lemmy.world
    0·
    22 days ago

    The way I solve this problem is to use nnn instead of ls. It’s a full file manager for the terminal but so light and quickly started that it’s as convenient as ls (a lot more so actually). You can navigate around your file system with vim-like key bindings and then have the option to exit either to the directory you started from or the one currently displayed.

  • scrion@lemmy.world
    0·
    22 days ago

    1. You could start by typing cd and use tab completion to explore your target folder(s). This would require at least a rudimentary knowledge of what you’re looking for so you can prefix your search

    2. If you really want to explore the contents and pick your target without knowing anything in advance, cd "$(find . -type d | fzf)" would give you a smart browser. You can of course replace ‘.’ with any base directory you like. Requires fzf.

    3. In general, zoxide can help with navigation.

    4. If you want to stay a purist, I’d go for simply recalling your last ls command from the history and replacing it with cd. An example has been given in the thread already.