I love terminals. Every day, I can have 5 or 10 of them open at the same time. Indeed, they can be used to program (for example you have one open inside VScode) a backend and a frontend, but also to do some git stuff, launch AI agents, etc.

The problem, however, when you open a new terminal every 10 minutes, is that you have to manually cd s/my-forge/my-project/my-repository/src every single time. And as terminals are quite ephemeral, this gets old fast.

about cons

So the idea is to store the last working directory of every terminal.

In Linux (maybe UNIX?), every terminal has a unique file descriptor that you can access through the tty binary¹:

$ tty
/dev/pts/3

Then, we can tell bash (or your preferred shell), to store its current working directory. I decided to store them in /dev/shm/cons_$USER:

# Where console history is stored
CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY="${CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY:-/dev/shm/cons_$USER}"

# Ensure storage exists
_cons_ensure_root() {
    [[ -d "$CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY" ]] || mkdir -p "$CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY"
}

# Save current directory for current TTY
cons_set() {
    _cons_ensure_root
    local tty_no
    tty_no="$(tty | awk -F/ '{print $NF}')"
    pwd > "$CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/$tty_no"
}

# Store current directory + ls at the end
cd() {
    local last="$PWD"

    if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
        builtin cd ~ || return
    else
        builtin cd -- "$*" || return
    fi

    cons_set >/dev/null
    ls
}

With this, every time you cd to a directory, the path is stored to /dev/shm/cons_$USER/$tty².

The next step is to be able to retrieve this list:

# List or jump to stored directories (unique)
cons() {
    _cons_ensure_root

    # Jump to entry
    if [[ $# -eq 1 ]]; then
        local target="$CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/$1"
        [[ -f "$target" ]] || { echo "$1 does not exist"; return 1; }
        builtin cd -- "$(cat "$target")" || return
        cons_set
        ls
        return
    fi

    # Show unique directories only
    local file dir
    declare -A seen

    for file in "$CONS_ROOT_DIRECTORY"/*; do
        [[ -f "$file" ]] || continue
        dir="$(<"$file")"

        # skip duplicates
        [[ -n "${seen[$dir]}" ]] && continue
        seen["$dir"]=1

        printf "%s >>\n\t%s\n" "$(basename "$file")" "$dir"
    done
}

The end result:

✔️ 23:11:49 ~$
⇶ cons
0 >>
	/home/frank/s/forge.k3s.fr/sisol/backend
1 >>
	/home/frank/s/forge.k3s.fr/frank/website
10 >>
	/dev/shm
5 >>
	/home/frank/s/forge.k3s.fr/k8sinfra/gitops
7 >>
	/tmp
✔️ 23:11:49 ~$
⇶ cons 1
archetypes  content  hugo.toml  layouts  public  static  themes
✔️ 23:11:55 (article-cons)~/s/forge.k3s.fr/frank/website
⇶

With this, when I need to open a new terminal and go to my project directory, I just cons-it, and there it is :-)

Cheers