Best Free and Open Source Navigation Tools

Walk is a simple and minimalistic terminal navigator

You may have seen our series on alternatives to popular CLI tools. While researching software for this series, we stumbled upon walk, an open source utility written in Go.

The developer also describes walk as a replacement for the venerable cd and ls commands. As these articles highlight, there’s very strong competition from other open source software.

Installation

The project provides prebuild binaries or you can install the software in Linux with snap or go. The image below shows the installation using go. It’s just a one line command.

Walk installation image

The command installs walk to ~/go/bin. If that directory is not in your PATH, copy the file to a directory that is such as /usr/local/bin, or add ~/go/bin to your PATH.

The next step depends on the shell you’re using. If you’re using Bash or Zsh, add this line to your configuration file (.bashrc or .zshrc).

function lk {
cd "$(walk "$@")"
}

The .bashrc file is a script file that’s executed when a user logs in. The file itself contains a series of configurations for the terminal session. This includes setting up or enabling: coloring, completion, shell history, command aliases, and more.

To complete, either log out of the shell or issue the command:

$ source .bashrc

To display icons, you can install any Nerd Font if one is not already present on your system.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

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