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.