I've just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.
I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I've learned a ton but one thing I can't seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I'm SSH'd to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I'm missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y'all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?
I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.
I'd love to hear any tips or tricks!
EDIT: I've been using Termius because they have a great Android client, but I wasn't about to pay $5/mo for sync. Especially to sync to someone else's cloud. Which led me to Tabby, which I understand has quite a large footprint resource-wise. But I guess I either don't know enough yet to be mad about it or it hasn't impacted any of my systems negatively yet. No Android client though, but you can bring your own sync solution and it has a handy little shortcut to SFTP to the current directory you're in. Between that and stuff like ranger, it's made it so much easier to learn my way around!
Not to be "that guy", but you can use a gui file manager to access your files the same way you do so in windows. Most of them support ssh keys as well. If you'd like to check out the cli stuff, nnn or ranger can be useful. Something like midnight as abckup is good too. Definitely install fzf on both your vps and local machine. You can also go over board and run xorg over ssh and run a small window manager, maybe awesomewm or even xfce (not that small but works fine).
I was speaking more towards my VPS , which of course has no OS GUI. In Unraid I do use the very nice GUI regularly though.
There are tools like sshfs that let you mount remote directories as if they're local. Most of the time I tend to use nnn with some of the little extra bits you can find in the docs like cd to last directory on quit and multi-colored tabs etc.
Midnight commander is a pretty nice alternative!