I’ve just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.

I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I’ve learned a ton but one thing I can’t seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I’m SSH’d to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I’m missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y’all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?

I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.

I’d love to hear any tips or tricks!

EDIT: I’ve been using Termius because they have a great Android client, but I wasn’t about to pay $5/mo for sync. Especially to sync to someone else’s cloud. Which led me to Tabby, which I understand has quite a large footprint resource-wise. But I guess I either don’t know enough yet to be mad about it or it hasn’t impacted any of my systems negatively yet. No Android client though, but you can bring your own sync solution and it has a handy little shortcut to SFTP to the current directory you’re in. Between that and stuff like ranger, it’s made it so much easier to learn my way around!

  • 257m
    11•1 year ago

    For navigating files quickly fzf is pretty much crucial to my workflow. Being able to get my home directory to the directory of the project I want to work on in two seconds flat is such a nice feeling after manually typing the path in for months. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

    • skimm
      5•1 year ago

      I’ve got to agree. It’s replaced z for me and its just a great multipurpose tool

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      Agreed, fzf (and similar fuzzy finders) have been a game-changer with regards to the way in which I navigate the shell. Add in a couple of one-liners and I’m never more than a second away from any nested directory

      Here are some of the most used aliases in my configs if anyone would like to try it out

      Note that they use fd and exa but they can easily be swapped out for find and ls if those aren’t available on your system (which would allow for shorter aliases since they’re the fzf defaults IIRC)

      alias update-cdd='fd -Ha -td -d1 -E "\.config" -E "\.local" "^\." ~ > ~/.cddignore'

alias cdd='cd "$(fd -H -td --ignore-file ~/.cddignore . ~ | fzf --preview "exa -lF --no-permissions {}" --tiebreak=length,end,begin --preview-window=up,20%)"'

alias cdf='cd "$(fd -H -tf --ignore-file ~/.cddignore . ~ | fzf --preview "bat --style=header-filename,header-filesize -r 40: --color=always {}" --tiebreak=length,end,begin --preview-window=up,20% | xargs dirname)"'