After that, the more dots you type, the more error-prone it is, as you start to have to carefully count exactly how many directories you have to go up to get to where you want.
A better alternative is a script that shows a list of parent directories and lets you select them by typing the number or letter associated with them.
For example, if your current directory is "/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h", then the script would display something like:
List of parent directories:
1 - a
2 - b
3 - c
4 - d
5 - e
6 - f
7 - g
Please choose a directory: _
and you could type "3" to get to directory "c". That would be equivalent to typing "......", but much less error-prone and it'll save you the tedium of counting dots too.
Error prone isn't really that important in a shell when we're just talking about moving around. You type a bunch of dots which puts you in the region more or less -- plus I never really go from 8 directories deep to 2, (I doubt I even have an 8 directory deep section of my file tree) -- if I did I'd start from /, so it's more about 4 or 5 or so, in which case it's easy enough not to count but to know based on context. To each his own though.
