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Overview

I like the idea that there are tools available to enhance the

'cd' command, remembering places you have been in the file

system and taking you there easily.

I use 'pushd'

and 'popd' for moving in and out of directories from a

place I want to do most of my work, but something more powerful than

these or cd have always seemed desirable.

I was using 'autojump' for a while last year, but didn’t

really get on with it. This was mainly because there was no way of

excluding certain directories which had been visited from its list.

Recently I heard of 'zoxide', which I have been trying

and really like.

zoxide

What is it?

From the GitHub

page:

zoxide is a smarter cd command, inspired by z1 and

autojump.

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.

In its man page it’s billed as “A faster way to navigate your

filesystem”.

It’s written in Rust so is very fast.

What does it do?

It offers the functionality of the Linux/Unix 'cd'

command.

It collects the directories you have visited into a database and

gives them a ranking relating to the number of times they have been

visited. It applies aging rules and removes these when the ranking drops

below one. It uses frecency to do this - a combination of

frequency and recency. (See the Wikipedia page

explaining this word)

It performs algorithmic matching on the directory you specify and

takes you to the highest ranking best match.

It can resolve conflicts between matching directories or can

allow selection through an interactive interface.

It can interface to fzf, a general-purpose

command-line fuzzy finder.

It “knows” where it is (in the Bash shell) by calling a function

out of the PROMPT_COMMAND variable. This can be used to

execute one or more commands before displaying the prompt for a new

command. This is a common way to hook monitoring commands into

a Bash session.

Where can you get it?

I installed it from the Debian Testing repo, but I got

'zoxide v0.4.3-unknown' whereas the latest version is

0.9.0. Installing from the GitHub page seems the

best option if you want the latest version.

There is an installation script on the GitHub page and it’s possible

to download it with curl and pipe it to Bash. I’m never

comfortable doing this, but that’s your choice.

I also installed fzf from the Debian Testing repo,

though I’m still learning what this can do, since it’s very rich in

features!

How do you set it up?

This process is shell-specific. I run Bash so I have added it to my

~/.bashrc and the command there is:

eval "$(zoxide init bash)"

What this does is generate a number of Bash functions and aliases and

some commands which are fed into eval and executed in the

current context.