How to Fish: Moving Between Recent Directories

I love Fish, because it makes a lot of common everyday tasks easier and more convenient. One such task is moving (switching) between folders you’ve visited recently. In my case I often jump between project directories, configuration directories, etc. Historically I’ve used things like cd -, pushd/popd and autojump/zoxide, but ever since I moved to Fish I realized all I needed was covered by the following built-in commands:

• prevd (Alt+left arrow) - takes you to the previous directory
• nextd (Alt+right arrow) - takes you to the next directory
• dirh (Ald+d) - shows a list of the recently visited directories
• cdh - allows you to quickly jump to any recently visited directly using letter or number shortcuts

Basically, things that require some manual setup/operations in other shells are handled automatically in Fish, as it maintains a list of the last 25 visited folders out-of-the-box.¹

Here’s how using cdh looks like:

cdh
 c  3)  ~/projects/batsov.com
 b  2)  ~/projects/rubocop-ast
 a  1)  ~/projects/rubocop
Select directory by letter or number:

Now you can press b or 2 to switch to rubocop-ast. I mostly use prevd and nextd (via their keybindings), but cdh is quite handy as well. Admittedly keybindings that use arrow keys are not ideal on every keyboard (as some compact keyboards don’t have arrow keys), but those can be easily remapped to whatever keys you fancy.

At this point I see no need for external tools to help with the directory history management, although you have to keep in mind that the directory history in Fish is not persistent, so you might still find some value in autojump/zoxide and friends.

That’s all I have for you today! Happy Fishing!

1. You can read more on the subject here. ↩