I’ve been spending a lot of time in the terminal lately, as most of us have with claude code and codex, across multiple projects and repos. I kept getting frustrated bouncing between cd, cd .., tab completion, and ls just to move cross projects.

I’m fairly visual and like seeing the parent directory and sibling options while navigating. It makes it much easier to hop around when you’re not sure exactly where something lives.

I tried tools like ranger and nnn, but they take over the whole terminal screen and it broke my flow. I wanted something much simpler that stayed inline and focused purely on navigation.

I’ve always found the macOS Finder column view extremely easy to move through, so I built catnav to bring that Miller-column style navigation to the terminal.

The idea is simple: keep parent/child context visible while you move so you can explore a tree without memorizing paths.

Curious what people think, especially if you have feedback or improvement suggestions.