Danny Bao - Navigating the terminal FASTER with Zoxide

GitHub - ajeetdsouza/zoxide: A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells.

I’ve heard of z-jumper but not zoxide. Zoxide is a smarter cd command.

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It remembers which directories you use most frequently, so you can “jump” to them in just a few keystrokes. Zoxide works on all major shells.

It’s a nice and easier out of box experience than I had with z-jumper. It’s built with Rust, frequently updated (at the time of writing) and available on multiple platforms.

You can use z as you would cd (Change Directory) but Zoxide has some extra quality of life features.

Zoxide cheatsheet

# Zoxide commands
add     Add a new directory or increment its rank
edit    Edit the database
import  Import entries from another application
init    Generate shell configuration
query   Search for a directory in the database
remove  Remove a directory from the database

# Normal use to jump directories
z <path>

# Zoxide interactive mode (requires fzf)
zi

# Query a path
zoxide query <path>

# Query a path with its score
zoxide query <path> -s

# List all matching directories
zoxide query -l

# List all matching directories with score using less utility
zoxide query -l -s | less

# Remove a given directory from database
zoxide remove <path>

# Brings up interactive menu to modify entries in your database
zoxide edit

Extra notes:

zoxide remove <path> is handy to remove any unresolved paths that are no longer around
zoxide edit is useful to see and modify everything in your database at once
zoxide query
- -l flag lists all entries
- -s flag shows the score of an entry
- Using both shows all paths and their score in the database
You can move up and down in zi with ctrl-p/n or use vim motions with ctrlj/k
Use the linux | less utility to view your database with pages as your database gets bigger

How it works under the hood

As you move around directories using z or cd Zoxide keeps track of your most visited paths and applies a weighting system to them they call ‘score’.

Usage

Say you edit in your ~/Developer/Code/project-x folder a lot because you’re working on a new project. With Zoxide you can use z project-x and jump multiple folders to get to the ‘project-x’ folder in one command.

4 things to keep in mind when searching with Zoxide

The search term is case insensitive
All of the terms must be contained within the path in the same order
The last component of the last keyword must match the last component of the path
All matches are returned in descending order of their weights

Zoxide interactive mode with fzf (fuzzy find)

Zoxide can work together with fzf. Use the zi to bring up zoxide interactive mode which is a fuzzy finder for your zoxide database. It shows all your paths and their score in a menu. You can scroll up and down with ctrl+p and ctrl+n or ctrl+j/k for vim motions

# Zoxide interactive mode
zi

Resources