On my mac, I need to spend a lot of time working with Finder and iTerm (or Terminal), and I find it tedious to switch between those 2 apps as I often need to open the working directory of iTerm inside Finder, and the opposite, cd to the current Finder folder in terminal.

The former is easy to accomplish by using the magic open . command in terminal and I have been using it for years. Very handy! For the latter, I have tried several solutions but was never satisfied. Here are some solutions I tried before:

• Pathfinder: Yes, pathfinder is a nice replacement to Finder and has terminal integration. It has a lot of features, but what I really need is a little piece. So this is an overkill to me.
• Visor (TotalTerminal) / iTerm Hotkey Window: Both can be used to open an overlay terminal window, but not be able to cd to the current folder automatically. And, it was not flexible to be enforced to work in that overlay window. I want to work in whatever terminal session that is already opened in my iTerm!
• Go2Shell: This is a little program which allows you to open the current finder folder in terminal. It works but it is still not flexible either. It always opens a new terminal window, and cannot let you work in your existing session.

So I decided to implement my own solution. It turns out to be easier that what I expected. What I need is to write is a little AppleScript and create a shell alias.

First, I need to write a little AppleScript code as the following:

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try
    tell application "Finder"
        set this_folder to (folder of the front window) as alias
    end tell
on error
    set the this_folder to path to desktop folder as alias
end try

set full_path to POSIX path of this_folder

Write the above code in a text editor and save it. I saved it as ~/bin/extra/GetCurrentFinderFolder.scpt.

The script is self-explanatory, if you execute it in command line via osascript /path/to/your_script, it would output the path of the opened folder in Finder.

Next, create a shell alias and add it in your .bashrc or .zshrc:

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alias cdf="cd \"\`osascript ~/bin/extra/GetCurrentFinderFolder.scpt\`\""

Note that you have to carefully escape the quote marks like above.

Now, you can use the handy cdf alias wherever you want in your terminal! I have been using this for a month and really enjoy it.