Mac ZSH option to open file via index?

Question

Working on zsh on MacOS...

I was wondering if there was a way to query files via an index # of the current directory. For example, if ls outputs:

folder1
folder2
file1.txt
file2.txt

I was wondering if there was a way to run a command such as open $FILES[2] to open file1.txt (assuming 0 index).

I noticed that the command open * opened all individual folders and files of the current directory (finder/default apps), but commands like open *[0] weren't recognized.

My end goal is to find an easy way to both open and pass files, whose names are particularly long to other programs. A screenshot for example typically has a long file name and if I wanted to pass to ImageMagik or something, I figured this sort of file reference would be most efficient.

I should mention I'd be willing to switch from zsh to bash if this were an option there.

Answer 1

Files have no inherent ordering on the filesystem, though can be sorted by name, modification time, or so forth; with ZSH you can select by say the most (or least) recently modified, if you can remember (or tab complete) on the single character flags involved:

% mkdir test
% cd test
% touch a
% touch b
% touch c
% print *(om[1])
c
% print *(Om[1])
a
% touch aa
% print *(om[1])
aa
% touch aaa
% print *(om[1])
aaa

By name is available but good luck counting to some file in the middle of the list (or maybe you're better at doing that math in your head than I am?):

% print *(on[1])
a
% print *(On[1])
c
% touch zzz
% print *(On[1])
zzz

Other sorting options are available, though besides the first or last it's probably not very viable for selecting a random filename. To select by a number you'd need software that would associate some number with the files loaded into an array, then a means to input some number to pick some filename. Doable, but maybe not the best interface. There are tools like fzf that might be better at file selection.

Usually for long filenames one will enable tab completion in the shell. Both bash and zsh support this, though it may require configuration.