Lf: Support for navigating history of jumps

[aidam38]

Hi, there is one crucial functionality not present at the moment in lf that I even think I must be missing something. It's going back in history of jumps, example use case:
I'm configuring some program in my home directory but I need to quickly jump to /etc to edit some config file but then come back immediately. In general when you are very deep in some directory and you accidentally bookmark away, you have to travel all the way back.
Bind like map <c-j> back would solve this, I believe ranger has it.
Thanks.

[gokcehan]

@aidam38 There is the automatic ' mark for the last visited directory. I think you can use it to for your usecase. However, there is no general mechanism to jump back more than once (i.e. jumplist).

[doronbehar]

As an fzf user, I think it would have been awesome if we could search all already visited directories in the current Lf session. Such functionality could be easily built around fzf if only Lf would provide e.g an environmental variable that will be available in all child shells or a command that will print these and that could be used with lf -remote.

This enhancement would help @aidam38 as well because it'll be possible to select a directory from the history stack via it's position.

[hajdamak]

Is it possible map mark ' to shortcut? If I add map <a-h> mark-load ' to config it still asks me to select mark after using this shortcut.

[gokcehan]

@hajdamak Assuming your mark-load command is still mapped to ' as default, you can try the following:

map <a-h> :push ''

[hajdamak]

@gokcehan Yeap, this works fine. Thanks.
This covers most important use case. Although having full history would be very handy.

[rafi]

Wish there was a simple way to jump through directory history stack backwards and forwards, irrelevant of fzf, _e.g._ map H history-stack-backward and map L history-stack-forward

[mvrozanti]

For what's worth, I managed to get a close (enough) behavior with the following in lfrc:

$pwd > ~/.dir-stack-lf
cmd on-cd &{{ 
    SKIP=`cat ~/.do_skip`
    if [ $SKIP -ne 1 ]; then
        pwd >> ~/.dir-stack-lf
    fi
    echo 0 > ~/.do_skip
}}
cmd go-back ${{ 
    last_dir="`tail -2 ~/.dir-stack-lf|head -1|sed 's;/;\\/;g'`"
    lf -remote "send $id cd \"$last_dir\""
    egrep -vE "^$last_dir$" ~/.dir-stack-lf > /tmp/lf-last-dirs
    mv /tmp/lf-last-dirs ~/.dir-stack-lf
    echo 1 > ~/.do_skip
}}
map H go-back

This is highly improvable though and I wouldn't mind having less dotfiles in it.

[wincent]

Neat idea @mvrozanti. I didn't know about the on-cd command; super useful. Took your idea and tweaked it in a few of ways:

• Keep one jump list file per client (means that if you have multiple lf instances running they don't clobber each other).
• Preserve jump list file across invocations of lf (use of uniq imposes an upper bound on the size of the list file).
• Using sed instead of head + tail because it should be faster.

Probably also "highly improvable though", just like yours 😂. Thanks for sharing.

map <f-6> jump-in
map <c-o> jump-out

${{
  JUMP_LIST=~/.config/lf/jump-list.$id
  JUMP_INDEX=~/.config/lf/jump-index.$id
  JUMPING=~/.config/lf/jumping.$id
  $pwd >> $JUMP_LIST
  uniq $JUMP_LIST $JUMP_LIST.uniq
  mv $JUMP_LIST.uniq $JUMP_LIST
  cat $JUMP_LIST | wc -l | sed -e 's/ //g' > $JUMP_INDEX
  rm -f $JUMPING
}}

cmd jump-in ${{
  JUMP_LIST=~/.config/lf/jump-list.$id
  JUMP_INDEX=~/.config/lf/jump-index.$id
  INDEX=$(expr `cat $JUMP_INDEX` + 1)
  MAX=$(cat $JUMP_LIST | wc -l)
  if [ $INDEX -le $MAX ]; then
    echo $INDEX > $JUMP_INDEX
    touch ~/.config/lf/jumping.$id

    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/6022431/2103996
    TARGET=$(sed "${INDEX}q;d" $JUMP_LIST)
    lf -remote "send $id cd \"$TARGET\""
  fi
}}

cmd jump-out ${{
  JUMP_LIST=~/.config/lf/jump-list.$id
  JUMP_INDEX=~/.config/lf/jump-index.$id
  INDEX=$(expr `cat $JUMP_INDEX` - 1)
  if [ $INDEX -gt 0 ]; then
    echo $INDEX > $JUMP_INDEX
    touch ~/.config/lf/jumping.$id

    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/6022431/2103996
    TARGET=$(sed "${INDEX}q;d" $JUMP_LIST)
    lf -remote "send $id cd \"$TARGET\""
  fi
}}

cmd on-cd &{{
  JUMP_LIST=~/.config/lf/jump-list.$id
  JUMP_INDEX=~/.config/lf/jump-index.$id
  JUMPING=~/.config/lf/jumping.$id
  if [ -e $JUMPING ]; then
    # If jumping, just move.
    rm $JUMPING
  else
    # Otherwise, truncate jump list at current index and record new directory.
    head -n $(cat $JUMP_INDEX) $JUMP_LIST > $JUMP_LIST.new
    pwd >> $JUMP_LIST.new
    mv $JUMP_LIST.new $JUMP_LIST
    INDEX=$(expr `cat $JUMP_LIST | wc -l`)
    echo $INDEX > $JUMP_INDEX
  fi
}}

[mvrozanti]

That default mapping is horrible

That being said, I'm copying all the rest to my lfrc. Thanks dude

Minor edit:

$pwd >> $JUMP_LIST

should be

pwd >> $JUMP_LIST

[MahouShoujoMivutilde]

I also wanted this, but found that having not just history, but a ranked by frequency and recency list is more useful.

Something like this can be done with z. Imo, it is a better way of doing it, since it also accounts for your cd's in interactive shell.

If you want just recency - that also possible via z -t. But note that database is the same across all lf instances. In that case - yes, separate simple jump lists as presented above are better.

But if you like me - here is how you can integrate z into lf.

Since z is designed to be sourced in shell rc file to work - we will need two simple helper scripts.

First one - z-add, as name suggests - is used to add directory into z database.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

source /usr/share/z/z.sh

# --add is undocumented for some reason, but it works
_z --add "$1"

Second - z-list - to list (ranked) directories from database

#!/usr/bin/env bash

source /usr/share/z/z.sh

_z -l 2>&1

Assuming those two somewhere in your $PATH - in lfrc add

cmd on-cd &{{
    z-add "$PWD"
}}
on-cd

# and fzf integration
cmd fzf_z ${{
    sel="$(z-list | sed "s|$HOME|~|g" | fzf +s --nth=2.. --tac | sed "s|~|$HOME|g;s|^[0-9,.]* *||")"
    [ -d "$sel" ] && lf -remote "send $id cd \"$sel\""
}}

map <c-g> fzf_z

Now when you'll press ctrl+g you'll be presented with ranked list of all visited directories:

If you want ranking by recency only - change -l to -t in z-add.

EDIT

TIL: there is no need for z-add / z-list shenanigans, zoxide exists, and you could just use zoxide add "$PWD" in on-cd, and zoxide query -l instead of z-list in fzf_z:

cmd fzf_z ${{
    sel="$(zoxide query -l | fzf +s)"
    [ -d "$sel" ] && lf -remote "send $id cd \"$sel\""
}}