Even windows can do this now with winget. It’s not quite as mature as I’d like it, but it’s got nearly everything I want.

You may want to check out the fish shell. The auto-complete is the only way I want to use the terminal nowadays.

One of the things that first made me fall in love with the cli was how fast doing things like this was. GUIs are hard, and can crash or use up resources for all sorts of different reasons wholly unrelated to the primary task you are trying to accomplish. Once I got over the learning curve of using the cli (and to be fair I’m still in the process of getting truly comfortable with it) I was able to do things so much faster and with less frustration.

Of course, I also don’t want to neglect that it’s not just a matter of the command line but just how good Linux is in this regard. Windows has a command line too and I hate using that thing.

fuzzy finding.

Something else you can do. Install oh-my-bash or oh-my-zsh, either, with zoxide jump around. Any of the directories you visit are tracked and weighted with a frecency weighted value. Then all you need to do is type in parts of the name to go there.

For instance, if I had directories ~/code/dev_repo/project-one ~/code/dev_repo/project-two ~/code/dev_repo/project-three

Then you just type z dev one or z co re pro two You know, the parts of the directories you remember. The more you visit various directories and the more recent, the weighting is higher and the more likely you get the correct directory you want with even less and less characters. Also check out atuin it adds a fuzzy finding to your bash history or zsh history.