Are you constantly traversing directories? Mass symlinking may be for you

I had a crazy idea and wanted to see some of the feedback you guys could give me. I am constantly going 5 to 6 levels deep from my ~ and it takes a long time to get to where I need to go. To solve this what if I did a mass symlinking, like every folder on my computer, to a directory that is only one level deep from my ~ folder. so I could just type cd masssym/myfolder instead of the brutal relative paths that I type now… Curious to hear what you guys have to say!

This seems a little excessive :smiley:

What I do it add this to my .bashrc so that cd automatically considers them as part of the path:

export CDPATH=".:$HOME:$HOME/Documents:$HOME/Documents/Notes:$HOME/Pictures:$HOME/Pictures/Screenshots:$HOME/Pictures/Travel:$HOME/Videos:$HOME/Videos/Travel:$HOME/Videos/Series"

I have a bunch more but you get the idea. This way if I’m on ~/Desktop I can do cd Notes and it takes me to ~/Documents/Notes.

There’s also something called “zoxide” but I’ve never tried it:

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I knew that you guys would have some good ideas. Thanks!

I wouldn’t use symlinks unless I have to. The alias or variable export idea is nice. I prefer using a terminal file manager (nnn, or if you don’t like vim-keybindings, mc or midnight commander).

I know exactly how many times I need to press j or k to reach a folder and if I know it’s too many hops, I just search with “/” and type part of the folder name and nnn takes me straight into it. If I need to do something with the folder, I just go 1 up after I got into it. Say I have a pictures folder, I 1 up, press o and type “sxiv” to open the folder with my image viewer. Or a highlighted music folder, I press o and type “mpv” (I use mpv for both video and music files). I need to open a file in libreoffice? Navigate to it → o → libreoffice. Done.

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Hey I just installed nnn and it is quite a good terminal utility.

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I’m also quite impressed with nnn. I’ve only used vifm before and I’m quite surprised that the keyboard controls are the same, and there’s no need to do any theming as it inherits the colors from terminal so it fits right in. I’ll give it a try to see if I can get used to work using a terminal file manager.

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