Old school, but I really like midnight commander or mc. Fast and easy.

Another good one is ranger - more concise, but great.

Not to be "that guy", but you can use a gui file manager to access your files the same way you do so in windows. Most of them support ssh keys as well. If you'd like to check out the cli stuff, nnn or ranger can be useful. Something like midnight as abckup is good too. Definitely install fzf on both your vps and local machine. You can also go over board and run xorg over ssh and run a small window manager, maybe awesomewm or even xfce (not that small but works fine).

https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z

Any directory in the filesystem is less than 5 key presses away

On my personal computer, zoxide, fzf, fzf tab completion allow me to jump around anywhere quite easily, I still use exa/cd for the most part. Look into this if you need more visualization. I still use a GUI file browser from time to time.

Oh my server though, I still use the default shell, so yes I just memorize where things are. But a trick is to allow for a large history file, and I use the command history search (Ctrl-R) because I tend to run the same things constantly. My setup helps too, I run things in docker, and have a data and a config directory, things go into each accordingly, and I bind mount those directories instead of using volumes.

If you edit config files a lot, in vim or nvim, :bro old will give you a list of files you recently edited and you can jump to them by inputting a number.

That's a good question 💯 In my case too, it took me some time (read years 😂) to figure out what I'm comfortable w/.

I can think of 3 major ways that you can navigate the filesystem while being able to drop to a shell when you need it:

• If you're familiar w/ Emacs, you can either:
  • Use dired and tramp on your machine to access/navigate the target machine.
  • Install Emacs (emacs-nox) on the target machine, SSH and then run emacs-nox and voila! No need for tramp in this scenario.
• Use Midnight Commander (mc) which offers a TUI pretty much like Norton Commander (nc) from the days of yore.
• Get used to the semi-standard structure of the file system and just use plain Bash (cd, pushd & popd) to move around. That is
  • Understand what usually goes into common directories (like /usr/share or /opt) and try to follow the same pattern when rolling your own software installations.
  • Learn how to use your distro's package manager to query packages and find out where things, like configurations and docs, are stored. Something as simple as rpm -q --list is what you usually need.

HTH

Vifm is ridiculously customizable but also assumes that you're competent with the modal paradigm of Vim.

If you're in a WM, you can use a terminal emulator with SIXEL support (Alacritty is no longer maintained but Wezterm is great) and you can get image previews as well.

Even on a headless server, I love being able to predefine bookmarks.

A simple workflow would be, 'e goes to '/etc/'. HJKL to whatever directory I want, ZZ, then there I am.

There's so much more that can be done, though.

Edit: It looks like alacritty is alive! No idea why I had thought that it had been abandoned. Apologies for the accidental gaslighting.

I find that zsh with plugins makes my life very easy. And if I need to quickly find something, fzf works wonders

I felt the same. Simple tasks I do in terminal, but when I have to deal with too many files and folders I use filebrowser. Its amazing docker container with simple GUI

I'm surprised I didn't see fasd fasd (pronounced 'fast') uses 'frecency' (frequency + recently) in order to jump to or open your most frecent documents or directories. A dumber version is z which works as a supliment to cd

cd, find, pushd, popd and last but not least nnn.

Often I don't find myself navigating directories when I reach for my file manager, but looking for something. Learning to use find or fzf gets rid of a fair amount of shuffling through your file system. Also, don't be afraid to type out full paths when performing copy or move commands. There isn't any reason to go to ~~/home/documents/12/directories/deep when you can simply put the path in your ls or other command. And of course, tab complete is your friend (~~/ho[tab}/doc[tab]/12/[tab]/deep, etc...)

@Father_Redbeard
alias !="cd .."

Works wonders on azerty keyboards, where ! is close to return key. I guess you could pair another key with ctrl for the same effect ?