FS-Nav

File System Navigation shortcuts for the commandline

Overview

FS-Nav allows users to navigate to directories by typing in a single word and pressing return.

Learning to use the commandline can be daunting but required in order to use specific tools. The goal of FS-Nav is to make navigating to common locations easier and slightly more intuitive both for new users and those that find themselves navigating complex file systems.

When set up FS-Nav allows the user to navigate to the like so:

$ cd ~/
$ pwd
/Users/geowurster
$ desktop
$ pwd
/Users/geowurster/Desktop

NOTE: The above functionality does not yet support the Windows commandline but works with cygwin.

Commandline Utilities

The nav utility is responsible for driving the file system navigation. There are several sub-commands, the most important of which is nav get, which prints out an alias's path.

$ nav get home
/Users/geowurster

In order to see a list of all currently recognized aliases, use nav aliases.

$ nav aliases
{'applications': '/Applications',
'desk': '/Users/geowurster/Desktop',
'desktop': '/Users/geowurster/Desktop',
...}

User defined aliases can be added with nav config addalias. New aliases can be added and default aliases can be re-defined but default aliases can not be fully deleted.

$ nav config addalias fsnav=~/github/FS-Nav desk=~/github
$ nav get fsnav
/Users/geowurster/github/FS-Nav

# Re-assign a default alias
$ nav get desk
/Users/geowurster/github

# Deleting a re-assigned default alias makes it revert to its original value
$ nav config deletealias desk
$ nav get desk
/Users/geowurster/Desktop

See nav config --help for additional commands.

Installation

Via pip:

$ pip install fsnav

Master branch:

$ git clone https://github.com/geowurster/FS-Nav
$ cd FS-Nav
$ python setup.py install

Setup

Once installed, FS-Nav requires the user to add a startup command to their profile. In order to just try FS-Nav, do eval $(nav startup generate).

Mac, Linux, Cygwin, etc.

$ nav startup profile >> ~/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile

Windows commandline "one-word navigation" is not yet supported.

Verify that everything is working properly with:

$ cd ~/
$ pwd
/Users/geowurster
$ desktop
$ pwd
/Users/geowurster/Desktop

Python API

For detailed information about a given object, do help(<object>).

Load only the default aliases FS-Nav defines on import.

from pprint import pprint

import fsnav

aliases = fsnav.Aliases(fsnav.DEFAULT_ALIASES)

The configfile is JSON encoded and user-defined aliases in a section called aliases. The path to the configfile is stored in fsnav.CONFIGFILE and the name of the section containing the aliases is stored in fsnav.CONFIGFILE_ALIAS_SECTION.

{
    'aliases': {
        'fsnav': '/Users/geowurster/github/FS-Nav/'
    }
}

Load the aliases in the configfile:

import json

import fsnav

with open(fsnav.CONFIGFILE) as f:
    cfg_aliases = json.load(f)[fsnav.CONFIGFILE_ALIAS_SECTION]

aliases = fsnav.Aliases(cfg_aliases)

Load multiple sets of aliases:

import fsnav

all_aliases = list(fsnav.DEFAULT_ALIASES.items()) + list(cfg_aliases.items())
aliases = fsnav.Aliases(all_aliases.copy())

Working directly with the core Aliases() class.

import fsnav

aliases = fsnav.Aliases()
new_aliases = {'desk': '~/Desktop', 'home': '~/'}

for a, p in new_aliases.items():
    aliases[a] = p
assert sorted(new_aliases.keys()) == sorted(aliases.keys())

del aliases['desk']
assert 'desk' not in aliases

aliases.update({'desk': '~/Desktop')
assert aliases['desk'] == new_aliases['desk']