Best practices for navigating file structure via terminal?
Best practices for navigating file structure via terminal?
I've just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.
I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I've learned a ton but one thing I can't seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I'm SSH'd to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I'm missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y'all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?
I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.
I'd love to hear any tips or tricks!
EDIT: I've been using Termius because they have a great Android client, but I wasn't about to pay $5/mo for sync. Especially to sync to someone else's cloud. Which led me to Tabby, which I understand has quite a large footprint resource-wise. But I guess I either don't know enough yet to be mad about it or it hasn't impacted any of my systems negatively yet. No Android client though, but you can bring your own sync solution and it has a handy little shortcut to SFTP to the current directory you're in. Between that and stuff like ranger, it's made it so much easier to learn my way around!
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Vifm is ridiculously customizable but also assumes that you're competent with the modal paradigm of Vim.
If you're in a WM, you can use a terminal emulator with SIXEL support (Alacritty is no longer maintained but Wezterm is great) and you can get image previews as well.
Even on a headless server, I love being able to predefine bookmarks.
A simple workflow would be,
'egoes to '/etc/'. HJKL to whatever directory I want, ZZ, then there I am.There's so much more that can be done, though.
Edit: It looks like alacritty is alive! No idea why I had thought that it had been abandoned. Apologies for the accidental gaslighting.
When did alacritty die? I thought it was still actively maintained. Maybe I missed an important commit somewhere but it looks active as of now?
Maybe I was wrong? Gonna check again. Alacritty was my fave. Hopefully I misread something.
Perhaps when it was under jwilms original repo and now its under the alacritty org. Looks like it's going strong and moving from yaml to toml config, which makes me happy.