qfi

quickly access commonly used files and directories

Introduction

qfi is a command line tool for UNIX-like systems, for quickly editing commonly used files, and switching to commonly used directories. This is accomplished through the use of targets, which are short aliases for files and directories.

Targets

qfi maintains a list of targets as symbolic links inside of its configuration directory. To add a target, we call qfi with the -a option, the name of the target, and the name of the file/directory:

$ qfi -a php /etc/php/php.ini

Now, whenever we want to open that file (or switch to that directory), we just call qfi with the name of the target:

$ qfi php

which will open up the given target using the following rules:

• If the file is a directory, cd into it.

• If the file is writable by you, open it with the program specified in the $EDITOR environment variable, or vi if $EDITOR is not defined.

• If the file is not writable by you, open the file with sudoedit.

So in this case, the file will be opened with sudoedit.

Installation

Pre-built

The easiest way to install qfi is to download a pre-built binary from the releases page for your OS and architecture. Unzip the binary, and move it to a directory in your $PATH. If you can run qfi and see the usage message , you're good to go. After that, you'll probably want read below to setup directory switching and tab completion for your shell.

From source

If you have Go installed, running go get github.com/ooesili/qfi will download and install program, although the version will not be set. To do a proper build from source cd into $GOPATH/src/github.com/ooesili/qfi and run make. You'll then see an executable called qfi that directory.

Description

Options

• The -a option will add a target pointing to the specified file/directory. If only one argument is given, the basename of the file wil be used as the target name:

  $ qfi -a [<target>] <filename>

• The -m option will move the destination of a target to a new file/directory:

  $ qfi -m <target> <filename>

• The -d option will delete the listed targets:

  $ qfi -d <target1> [<target2> [...]]

• The -r option will rename a target:

  $ qfi -r <target> <newname>

• The -l option will list all targets, or where the specified target points to, if one was given:

  $ qfi -l [target]

• The -s option will show the status and destination of each target.

  $ qfi -s

  Listings are in the following format:

  target *> /path/to/destination
  

  where the line's color and `*>' are one of the following:

  Symbol	Meaning	Color
  ->	writable file	green
  />	directory	blue
  #>	non-writable file	yellow
  ?>	unknown file	purple

  Red lines indicate a non-existent or non-accessible file, or a non chdir-able directory. These files may still be used, but you may encounter problems saving them if their parent directories do not exist.

• The --shell prints wrapper and completion scripts for the supported shells:

  $ qfi --shell (zsh|fish|bash) (comp|wrapper)

• The --help and --version options will display usage and version information, respectively.

Configuration Directory

The configuration directory defaults to $HOME/.config/qfi, but $QFI_CONFIGDIR will be used if it is defined.

Tab Completion

qfi comes with bash, zsh, and fish tab completion support for targets and options. For bash completion to work, bash-completion must be installed on the system.

bash

Put this line into your ~/.bashrc:

eval "$(qfi --shell bash comp)"

fish

Put this line into your ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

eval (qfi --shell fish comp)

zsh

Installing zsh is a little more complicated. Write the completion script to a file called _qfi, and put that file inside of a directory in your $FPATH. For example:

$ qfi --shell zsh comp > /usr/share/zsh/site-functions/_qfi

Directory Switching

qfi allows targets to point to directories, in which case your shell will cd into the directory. This feature was largely inspired by autojump, which is a very cool piece of software with similar functionality. The following commands will setup directory switching for your shell:

bash:

eval "$(qfi --shell bash wrapper)"

fish:

eval (qfi --shell fish wrapper)

zsh:

eval "$(qfi --shell zsh wrapper)"

Motivation

The reason I created qfi is that I found myself editing certain files on my system quite often, and typing out the paths to these files over and over again seemed awfully redundant. qfi removes some of this redundancy by creating shorter names for commonly used files, which I call targets. I also wanted to make qfi simple and easy to learn so that it wouldn't take more time to learn than it would save.