Here’s another trick to speed up file system navigation in the shell. A previous tip showed how to use bookmarks to reach deeply nested directories effectively.

I use that a lot, but I frequently use it to enter directories with a large number of subdirectories whose names are long and share a prefix:

...
Arteria-Media-ImageEditor
Arteria-Media-ImageEditor-Base
Arteria-Media-ImageRep-Magick
Arteria-Media-JSONClient
Arteria-Media-JSONSegmenter
Arteria-Media-Webapp-MediaServer
...

I wanted a way to enter one of these directories by typing only a minimal, unique substring of its name (like typing *substring* but only considering directories and ignoring case), so I wrote this shell function:

function c {
	shopt -q nocasematch || resetcase=1
	shopt -s nocasematch
	for i in *; do [ -d "$i" ] && [[ "$i" == *"$1"* ]] && cd "$i" && break; done
	[ $resetcase ] && shopt -u nocasematch
}

Now I can type

c ncl

and, in the example directory above, it takes me directly into the Arteria-Media-JSONClient subdirectory.