Automatically detect when I typed "vi" but meant "cd"?

Question

About 5 times a day, I type "vi" when I meant "cd", and end up opening a directory in vi. It's making me NUTS. It seems like there should be a way to detect when I type in "vi + directory" and automatically change it to "cd + directory". Thoughts?

Answer 1

With the assumption that you call vi with the directory as the last argument:

vi() {
    if [[ -d ${!#} ]]; then
        cd "$@"
    else 
        command vi "$@"
    fi
}

Answer 2

Apart from @ChrisDown answer, here is another approach: bypass directories

With this approach, you can :

vi ./*

and it will start vi on all the files in the current directory even if it contains subdirs, bypassing those subdirs

vi() {
  for arg do
    [ -d "$arg" ] || set -- "$@" "$arg"
    shift
  done
  [ "$#" -gt 0 ] && command vi "$@"
}

This one just do vi, on any argument that are not directories... Hence it won't teach you to use "vi" for "cd" ;)

And it will not call vi if you just did: vi somedirectory (ie, mistyped vi instead of cd). But it will not cd there automatically then, so you still remember you have to type cd ^^

I used a "compatible" way to change the arguments lists, so that it's portable to many platforms.

Answer 3

One solution is to stop using cd altogether. Put shopt -s autocd in your .bashrc or setopt autocd in your .zshrc. Then to change to a different directory, type the directory name, without any command.

Don't forget to type vi if you want to edit a file.

If you really want a single command to either change to a directory or edit a file, you can make it a function:

vi () {
  if [ $# -eq 1 ] && [ -d "$1" ]; then
    cd -- "$1"
  else
    command vi "$@"
  fi
}

Answer 4

Use alias feature in Unix. Once you alias cd to vi, the problem will be resolved.