Smart Directory Navigation with go-navigate

The go-navigate command is a smarter way to move between directories. Just type the base-name of the folder you want, and go-navigate will almost always bring you there, even if it has to jump across the file tree. When combined with a short alias, it makes changing directories effortless -- I rarely find the need to type more than a basename.

The four different methods that go-navigate uses to determine a destination directory, are, in order of preference:

1. cd - If it is possible to cd into the supplied relative path, go-navigator will perform the cd operation. This means you can start using go-navigator as a simple drop in for cd and it will do the right thing.
2. Shortcuts - Custom shortcuts (symbolic links) stored in the ~/.go_links allow you to navigate to tricky places with minimal keystrokes.
3. Most Recent - Navigate to the most recently visited directory with the same base name as the one given. This acts as a cache, making it extremely efficient to access your most frequently used directories.
4. Depth-limited Search [Experimental] - Search through top-level directories starting from the home folder, and continuing at folder depths of 1-4. This is a very slow search method, but will find almost any folder. Once the folder is found, it will be added to the history, making future accesses faster. Feedback on the usefulness of this feature, compared to its slow speed, is appreciated.

Installation

Since go-navigate changes the current directory, it must be run as a bash function, not as a bash program¹. This means that rather than adding the executable to your path, you must define the go-navigate function. This needs to occur in your .bashrc,.bash_profile, .profile, or whatever other login file you choose to use. For most people, the following command will make sure the function is loaded when you log in to your terminal:

echo ". $(pwd)/go-navigate" >> ~/.bashrc

Usage

go-navigate [dest]
go-navigate [-h,--help]
go-navigate [-a,--add] linkname destpath
go-navigate [-r,--remove] linkname
go-navigate [-l,--list]

The dest given to go-navigate can be one of the following:

1. Nothing

   If no destination is given, go-navigate changes the current directory to the home directory (same as cd).

2. Pathname

   Both relative and absolute pathnames are accepted by go-navigate, and will be navigated to the same way that cd navigates to them.

3. Shortcut

   If a name does not resolve to an absolute or relative path, go-navigate will check if the name matches a shortcut. If a matching shortcut is found, the current directory is set to the directory the shortcut points to ².

   If a shortcut is found, but the link is broken, the shortcut will be deleted to avoid future false positives.

4. Folder Base Name

   When a name that cannot be evaluated as a relative path, absolute path, or shortcut is given, go-navigate will attempt to find a directory with the given name. This base name should either correspond to a recent directory

Recent Directory Example

In case there is confusion about the recently visited directory behavior, the following is a use case showing a directory that is visited often, but that is deep in the file tree:

$ go-navigate notes
go-navigate: notes: Directory not found.
$ go-navigate ~/Documents/CMU/F16/15410/notes
$ go-navigate # Goes to ~
$ go notes # Goes to ~/Documents/CMU/F16/15410/notes

Shortcut Management

Shortcuts are stored in the form of symbolic links. For now, go-navigate only looks for shortcuts in one directory. By default this directory is ~/.go_shortcuts, but it can be set by exporting a new global GO_SHORTCUT_DIR in your .bashrc (or similar login file).

To save you from having to manipulate these directories yourself, go-navigate has --add|-a and --remove|-r subcommands to add and remove shortcuts, respectively³:

# Adding a shortcut
$ go-navigate --add os ~/Documents/CMU/F16/15410
$ go-navigate os # Goes to /Users/Scott/Documents/CMU/F16/15410

# Removing a shortcut
$ go-navigate --remove os

There is also a --list|-l subcommand that allows you to view a list of your saved shortcuts:

$ go-navigate --list
os -> /Users/Scott/Documents/CMU/F16/15410

Replacing cd

It may be tempting to entirely replace cd with go-navigate. For a human, this is totally reasonable, but before aliasing away your old cd command, remember that other programs may rely on its exact behavior.

I recommend using an alias for go-navigate whenever you change directories in your terminal, and leaving the cd command as-is to ensure you don't screw up other programs.

If you do not use the Go Language, creating an alias go for go-navigator convenient. gn, gd or the more verbose goto are also good aliases. You can define them in your .bashrc like so:

alias gn='go-navigate'

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¹ Typical command line programs execute in their own process (forked from the main shell process). Executing a cd command inside of such a forked process will not have an effect on the parent shell process. Functions, on the other hand, are run as part of the current process, hence go-navigate is defined as a function rather than a program.

² This means that if a symbolic link in the shortcut folder named mylink points to /Users/Scott/Documents/Courses/15410, go-navigate mylink changes the current directory to /Users/Scott/Documents/Courses/15410 not ~/.go_shortcuts/mylink. Going to the directory that the symbolic link points to, instead of setting the symbolic link to the current directory, keeps file paths cleaner.

³ Note that --add and -a, --remove and -r, and --list and -l, are long- and short-hand forms of the same exact command. There is no functional difference between using the long or short form, it is a matter of personal preference.