Navigating around in your shell

The author shares many useful tips for navigating shell environments. Most of them were built-in. The following were particularly relevant to my interests.

Go to previous directory

cd -

This command takes you to the previously visited directory.

Use globs

Cut out large sections of long paths with globs. E.g. ~/Downloads/**/mynestedproject.

Case-insensitivity and spellcheck

setopt nocaseglob # ignore case
setopt correct # correct spelling mistakes

pushd and popd

pushd is like cd but it adds the current directory to the directory stack prior to the change. You can use popd to navigate back to the latest entry on the stack.

Create custom hashes

hash -d yourprefixname=fullpath

This lets you define custom prefixes such as ~projects for relative paths. The author cited another source¹ for more info.

CDPATH

The CDPATH envirionment variable can be set to add autocompletion and relative path navigation. For example:

CDPATH+=$HOME/Downloads

Now I could cd into any subdirectory in Downloads from any directory.