Better way of navigating directories in Linux

Have you ever thought: “Maan I wish I could navigate trough my directories faster?”

Maybe yes maybe no, but I sure did. I am always trying to maximize my desktop setup efficiency. This is the reason that I am using i3 window manager coupled with zshell and neovim. This settup has been a life saver honestly and very fun to use.

The small problem

I noticed that every time I wanted to open up a project directory it would be the same old sameold: Type in cd then try to remember where the directory I’m looking for is. Maybe Documents? Maybe Projects? Who knows? We will have to try them all. Eventualy you find it and its all good, you wasted a couple of seconds and who cares?

This is what the classic experience looked like:

I did it like this for years until I stumbled upon this interesting tool called the fuzzy finder or fzf. This tool is just so powerfull and fast. What it essentialy does is given some input of lines it filters out the one line that matches the given query the most. Could this be used to traverse the directory tree faster? The answer is yes.

How to set it up

So firstly install the tool if you already don’t have it on our system. If using apt it is gonna be sudo apt install fzf.

Secondly, if you try and just type in fzf in your terminal, you will notice that it tries to find files and not directories. The solution is that you pass to it only directories using the find command.

The full command is find . -type d -print to print out all directories going from current directory.

Putting it all together

Full command you should be using to go to desired directory is cd $(find . -type d -print | fzf). Since it is a long command i sugest making an alias to it. Something like fd (find directory) works for me.

To make an alias for zshell edit the ~/.zshrc file. For bash it is ~/.bashrc.
Add this line at the end of the file: alias fd="cd \$(find . -type d -print | fzf)". The forward slash before the $ sign is very important. If you type it in withought the forward slash, the command is going to execute just once every time you open up your shell.

This is the end result: