My favorite shell is the fish shell. It does not need much configuration and works fairly well out of the box including color highlighting and smart completions and suggestions. Except for the mediocre vim mode (UPDATE 2021-03 this has gotten so much better now! Vi mode bindings now support dh, dl, c0, cf, ct, cF, cT, ch, cl, y0, ci, ca, yi, ya, di, da, d;, d,, o, O) I do not have much to complain about. There are just a couple of things that I do miss when working in the shell:
- jumping to one of my git projects (either for work or personal projects)
- searching for a specific subdirectory that may be burried somewhere deep
For the first problem I use a rust tool called projector
in combination with the great fzf.
projector has a config file to specify all the root
locations for possible git repositories (e.g. the intellij folder and a
local repos folder etc.). The output is fed into fzf for an
interactive search. I pass the --layout=reverse option to
display the results below for a better overview. I call the alias
jump:
alias jump "cd (projector list | fzf --layout=reverse --height=40%)"That takes care of the first problem. The second problem can also be
solved via fzf. Actually most shells already offer some
kind of fzf-plugin with some keyboard shortcut to
interactively search subdirectories. But I have found that those plugin
usally do not play nice with my local (german) keyboard layout and make
quite a few assumptions I don’t share. Instead I usually just use my own
alias which calls the rust tool fd.
fd ist great alternative to find with a much
more intuitive UI and features like respecting the gitignore by
default.
alias deep "cd (fd -t d | fzf --layout=reverse --height=40%)"I call the alias deep. fd ist called with
the -t d option as only directories should be searched.