So many layers to unpack. I hate this so much.

As if lack of leverage ever stopped him from saying stupid shit

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.

^ls^cd

will do exactly what you want, replace ls with cd from the previously run command