If you are not a hundred percent sure of the name of the directory you want to go to next, you have to use ls. Then use cd to go where you want to. Hopefully, a lot of terminals and shell languages now propose a powerful auto-completion feature to cope with that problem. But it remains that you have to hit the tabulation key frenetically all the time. If you are as lazy as I am, you will be very interested in autojump. autojump is a command line utility that allows you to jump straight to your favorite directory, regardless of where you currently are.