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.