Best Free and Open Source Navigation Tools

fasd – quick access to files and directories for POSIX shells

Fasd (pronounced similar to “fast”) is a very convenient, open source command-line productivity booster. This utility offers quick access to files and directories for POSIX shells. It is inspired by tools like autojump, z and v.

The tool adds a hook which is executed whenever the user executes a command. The hook scans the commands’ arguments and determine if any of them refer to existing files or directories. If so, fasd adds them to the database.

Fasd keeps track of files and directories you have accessed, so that you can quickly reference them in the command line. Fasd ranks files and directories by “frecency” that is, by both “frequency” and “recency.” The term “frecency” was first coined by Mozilla and used in Firefox.

Fasd is originally written based on code from z. Most of the code has been rewritten.

Key Features

  • Autojump and z with support for files.
  • History file / directory completion.
  • Custom program launcher.
  • Smart address bar.
  • Useful aliases.
  • Three matching modes: default, case-insensitive, and fuzzy.
  • Two completion modes, command mode completion and word mode completion. Command mode completion works in bash and zsh. Word mode completion only works in zsh.
  • Unique aliases and environmental variables to improve performance.
  • Take advantage of different sources of recent / frequent files. Most desktop environments (such as OS X and Gtk) and some editors (such as Vim) keep a list of accessed files. Fasd can use them as additional backends if the data can be converted into fasd’s native format.
  • Basic functionalities are POSIX compliant, meaning that you should be able to use fasd in all POSIX compliant shells. Tested on the following shells: bash, zsh, mksh, pdksh, dash, busybox ash, FreeBSD 9 /bin/sh and OpenBSD /bin/sh.

Website: github.com/clvv/fasd
Support: Wiki
Developer: Wei Dai
License: MIT/X11 license


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Read our verdict in the software roundup.


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