I like using tree command in Linux, thankfully it has been ported to Mac as well and it is quite easy to get tree representation of files and folders inside a directory on a shell. An article on StackOverFlow talks about it aptly. The original site is here.

In case you are using brew then it is quite easy peasy as shown below:

brew install tree

The following commands generate a tree view:

Generates a tree of all files and folders in the current directory:

tree

Generates a tree containing only folders in the current directory:

tree -d

Generates a tree containing only folders for 3 levels depth.

tree -d -L 2 .

In case you want to use vanilla shell without installing anything. (doesn’t generate a tree though).

find . -maxdepth 3 - type d