cd-deep-broot.fish

A fish plugin to cd deep into any directory, invoking broot as a fallback

Elevator pitch: Yet another alternative cd command?

Tons of alternative cd commands exist, such as z (or its clones), various implementations of bookmarks, fzf, broot and many others. But in the following use case, I found all of them to be unsuitable:
Assume that you are in some directory ~/project/ and you want to cd into a directory foo_things which is somewhere below the current directory.

• Shell globs, i.e. cd **/*foo* are annoying to type and fail if the directory isn't unique
• bookmarks are useless if this isn't a directory you want to bookmark.
• z is useless if you haven't visited this directory before. Without additional options, z foo may also jump to any other matching location outside of ~/project/.
• fzf works fine, but its view of the filesystem isn't terribly helpful. Also, invoking fzf without an initial search string will flood you with irrelevant matches, which can be irritating.
• broot works great, but invoking it introduces a context switch that is overkill if the search string foo is sufficient to uniquely identify that directory.

This plugin aims to solve this particular use case. Just type

cd_deep_broot foo

to cd into foo_things if it is a unique match with foo below ~/project/. Otherwise (in the case of several or no matches), it invokes broot prepopulated with the search string foo to give you an overview of the filesystem and let you choose the directory manually.

Additionally, instead of the directory name you can use a filename if it's unique. For example, starting from ~

cd_deep_broot -F config.fish

will cd directly into ~/.config/fish, unless there is another config.fish file below ~. For more details on search modes, see Configuration/Options below.

Requirements

Uses fd to search the directory and broot (actually its shell function br) as a fallback.
Also uses the cd function (not the cd builtin) to not break navigation prevd and nextd.

Installation

Using fisher:

fisher install bagohart/cd-deep-broot.fish

Manually:

Copy the file cd_deep_broot.fish into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fish/functions/ (probably ~/.config/fish/functions).

Configuration/Options

cd_deep_broot is an intentionally long name to prevent clashes with other plugins. Add a line to your fish.config file to alias it, and optionally add some arguments, for example:

alias cdd 'cd_deep_broot --min-depth=2 --hidden'

cd_deep_broot accepts a number of options most of which are passed to both fd and broot. (Note that options for broot and fd are partly incompatible, so they are translated internally.)

H/hidden

Include hidden directories (and files) in the search.

I/ignored

Include (fd/git-ignored) directories (and files) in the search.

max-depth, min-depth

Limit the min and max depth of the search (only passed to fd).

Different search modes: D/show-dirs-only, d/search-dirs-only, f/search-files-and-dirs, F/search-files-only

Choose exactly one of those (default d/search-dirs-only):

• D: Search only for directories, show only directories in broot
• d: Search only for directories, show both directories and files in broot
• f: Search for both directories and files, show both directories and files in broot
• F: Search only for files, show both directories and files in broot

Related

If you want to cd up instead of down, check out cd-upwards.fish.