Fill in the latest used file in the current directory

Question

I am looking for a way to quickly access the latest file/directory on the command line, preferably in ZSH.

ls -d *(om[1])

Gives me just that, and if I want to use to with a command, e.g. less *(om[1])

This works as well.

However, it is tedious to type all the brackets, and I use this a lot - hence I am looking for a way to create a shortcut for this string.

I've created a function in the .zshrc-file

lf(){ 
ls -d *(om[1])
}

, which I can use like this:

less <$(lf)
less <`lf`

, but I find this still less than ideal.

less |lf

does not work.

Is there a way to quickly access the latest file without the use of "hard to type characters"? Ideally, it would just be something along the lines of

less LATEST

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could use the _most_recent_file (^Xm).

_most_recent_file (^Xm)

Complete the name of the most recently modified file matching the pattern on the command line (which may be blank). If given a numeric argument N, complete the Nth most recently modified file. Note the completion, if any, is always unique.

-- zshcompsys(1) BINDABLE COMMANDS

So, we can get the most recent file with typing CTRL-x-m. For example:

% less ;# typing `CTRL-X m` here, we could get:
% less newest-file-or-directory

And we could specify some patterns here, so for example:

% less *.log ;# when I want the newest *.log:
% less newest.log

It is necessary to have some autoload -Uz compinit; compinit in the ~/.zshrc though.