Auto-jump through single-child directory chains in find-file

[roife]

I would like to request a feature for find-file / file-name completion: automatically skip through directory chains where each intermediate directory contains only one subdirectory. This is a common pattern in Java projects.

For example, in Java projects it is common to have paths like:

root/module/src/main/java/com/company/module/module/File.java

When using find-file, entering this path currently requires stepping through each directory level manually, which is annoying. However, many of these intermediate directories contain only one child directory. In such cases, it would be useful if we could automatically jump to the deepest non-trivial directory, similar to GitHub’s “folder jumping” behavior or dired-collapse in dired-hacks.

Besides, it would ignore trivial entries like .DS_Store

This would make find-file much more convenient for languages and project, especially Java package paths, Maven/Gradle projects, and generated source trees.

[minad]

You should report this as an upstream feature request for find-file, M-x report-emacs-bug.