I use tab complete a lot to find a file/path. would cd /foo/some<tab>/more<tab>/desti<tab> get you there any easier?

Looks like no one has mentioned this yet. So I'll be the FZF champion in this thread.

The ZSH plugin for FZF gives you a few commands that use the fuzzy search to find files by name, keyword in content etc.

It could be very easy to add something like that for your use case where you can use and you pick the file name from the output and it automatically cd's into the selected file's directory.

There's already some great answers in the thread, so I won't add to those.

Some shortcuts are shell-specific. For example, !!, !:$, and ^old^new are in bash, but not in fish.

Some things, like Alt-. and Ctrl-a, are implemented by readline, which can be used elsewhere, as well, for example in the python interpeter.

Depending on your context, it may be better to invest time learning methods implemented by readline. While not necessarily universal, they are more versatile.

There were heaps of functions I was using not realising they were from readline. For example, Ctrl-r for reverse interactive search, Ctrl-a/e for start/beginning if line, Ctrl-w for deleting a word.

Havent seen this mentioned: https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff

check the cd on exit part: https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff#cd-on-exit

You mean something like this?
ls /your/long/path/name
cd !$

You can hit TAB in any decent shell to autocomplete paths. Personally I highly recommend fish

so you have better answers but still going to do mine. up arrow and change ls to cd.

You may want to learn about the shell's "history expantion" functions. as an example:

~$ ls ~/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012/2012-12-01.txt  
/home/tom/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012/2012-12-01.txt  

~$ cd !!$:h  
cd ~/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012  

~/Documents/tax_2012$ pwd  
/home/tom/Documents/taxes/tax_year_2012  

Here the string "!!$:h" is basically the last command's [ !! ] last argument [$], stripped of its last path component [:h].

Type cd then press Alt+. and it'll copy the last argument of the previous command, make sure it's what you want, and press Enter.

For me I replaced cd with https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

cd to anywhere from anywhere, don't even need to type the whole thing. Algorithm: https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide/wiki/Algorithm#matching

The way I solve this problem is to use nnn instead of ls. It's a full file manager for the terminal but so light and quickly started that it's as convenient as ls (a lot more so actually). You can navigate around your file system with vim-like key bindings and then have the option to exit either to the directory you started from or the one currently displayed.

What I do is: Up, Home, type cd , Delete (hold/repeat as many times as needed), Enter.

The Home key instantly brings your cursor to the start of the command line (before the ls), even if the command is long enough to wrap.

I'm not a terminal guru, and I don't aspire to become one. I don't want to memorize arcane symbols that each has a subtly different meaning, and I especially don't want to execute them before I see explicitly what they're going to do. So while the top comment of cd !$ is a perfectly good and correct answer, I offer this alternative in case you, like me, like to see what you're doing as you do it. Home and End are pretty good.

Bookmarking this whole thread

Is it uncool to use a GUI?

If you're using bash and haven't modified the readline default, which is to use emacs keystrokes:

$ ls foo/bar/baz

Just what I wanted!

Control-P Control-A Alt-D cd Enter

In addition to

^ls^cd

I mentioned in another comment, I highly recommend you try "z", installable on macos via "brew install z" (not sure if it's available on linux package managers). Suppose you want to jump to ~/Desktop/project1/foo, you can just type "z foo". It works without a full path, from anywhere, as long as you cd'd in there at least once.