TL;DR you’ll be able to do this:

Intro

If you develop software, you may appreciate the command line as a productivity tool. This is the case for me, and some tools that make my developer life easier include: vim, tmux, and zsh.

One thing I like about zsh is the .. shortcut to go back 1 directory. See:

$ pwd
~/dev/teach/blog
$ ..
$ pwd
~/dev/teach

It merely saves having to type the full cd .. command, but it is so handy!

(note: the actual pwd output does not abbreviate /home/geovane to ~, but I do it here for simplicity)

The gap

What I wanted, however, was a way to go back N directories. So that I could do this:

$ pwd
~/dev/teach/blog
$ .. 2
$ pwd
~/dev

So I created fastnav_up, a bash function that does exactly that. It is very simple:

fastnav_up() {
    # if no parameters, navigate up only 1 directory and stop
    [ -z "$1" ] && cd .. && return 0

    # filter parameter $1, should contains only numbers
    [ "$( echo $1 | sed "s/[0-9]*//g" )" ] && echo "\$1 must be a number" && return 1 || n=$1

    dirs_up=
    for i in $(seq $1); do
        dirs_up+="../"
    done
    cd $dirs_up

    return 0
}
alias ..="fastnav_up"

Note that bash does not let us use the dot character (.) within a function name, but that can be easily overcome with an alias :)

And it just works! I actually created this a few years ago, and it’s been a life saver ever since.

I want more

Alright, the new .. 2 is cool, but what if I wanted to count backwards? Like, if I am too deeply nested, it may be difficult to count how many directories to go up.

For this I created fastnav_down (aliased to ,,), which works like this:

$ pwd
~/dev/teach/blog/resources/_gen/images
$ ,, 1
$ pwd
~/dev/

The code is also simple:

fastnav_down() {
    [ "$( echo $1 | sed "s/[0-9]*//g" )" ] && echo "\$1 must be a number" && return 1 || n=$1

    # separate path components into a string array
    a=( $(echo $(pwd) | sed "s;\/; ;g") )

    ((n+=2)) # we are starting from /home/<your-user>/
    dir=$(echo "${a[@]:0:$n}" | sed "s; ;\/;g") # slice the array and put slashes back
    cd /$dir

    return 0
}
alias ,,="fastnav_down"

Enjoy!

If you found this useful, you may want to add enhanced .. and ,, to your .bashrc (or .zshrc, etc.). A commented version of them is available at this github gist, and an automated way to add it is:

$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/geonnave/335fa20e82a19d9fb177d65e27828fe2/raw/709a98cdb6b6b514b66c31a6cab4af41f99a3793/fastnav.sh && chmod +x fastnav.sh && echo "source $(pwd)/fastnav.sh" >> $HOME/.bashrc

(note: if you are using zsh, change .bashrc to .zsh)