Zoxide: A Better CD Command (github.com)

One of those fundamental work-changing tools. I use it dozens of times a day. It's fantastic

I couldn’t live without it now. Very simple yet effective tool

zoxide alongside fzf, eza, bat and starship were my killer CLI productivity tools I discovered after ditching Windows for Fedora. I have it aliased to `cd` so I don't really notice when I'm using it until moving to a Terminal that doesn't have it.

How is this any different from z?

I tried zoxide for a while but I really disliked how it made things fuzzy, and most of the use cases for it I found were 90% solved by using ZSH's history search which I use routinely anyway.

It gives you this potentially constantly shifting set of shortcuts, essentially, and the problem is that means I have to constantly check I did get the result I wanted, and that I haven't accidentally gone to the wrong place. I found that more annoying to me than just using tab completions or history, which are much more predictable.

I can see how someone who has different workflows or environments might find it great though.

Does anyone know if zoxide has any fancy logic to ignore strings that appear in common prefixes?

For example I have a big ~/src dir where I keep all my code checkouts. If I type 'z src' intending to go to ~/src/foo/bar/src, will it be clever enough to realise that I am referring to the second instance of the string 'src'?

I currently use a Fish port of the original 'z'. It does ignore the common prefix of _all_ matches (so if I only ever used it within my ~/src tree, the problem would disappear) but after that binary exclusion it works exclusively on frecency.

super happy to be a super of such an amazing tool, thank you!

Does anyone know, how this compares to [autojump](https://github.com/wting/autojump)?

Could not imagine using regular cd for navigating file systems anymore.

One useful thing I discovered recently about zoxide is that it has a basedir flag, so in theory you scan scope your query to the directory you’re in or based off some git root.

something like

alias zg=‘zoxide —basedir $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)’

https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide/pull/1027

For me, this simple tools is the single best command line changer! Instead of a lot of commands to traverse the folder tree, I jump where and when I want.

Other nice tools I use: Fish for shell (https://fishshell.com/), Starship for prompt (https://starship.rs/), bat "a cat with wings" for file preview (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat).

Is it just me, or is it actually a new trend that the first thing on the README page is an advertisement? Could this perhaps even be related to the AI glut?

In any case, aberrations such as the excessive use of emojis and exaggeration are becoming increasingly common, which is yet another reason for me to distance myself from GitHub. For me, a README that more closely follows the conventions and minimalism of a classic man page is a sign of quality, and it could perhaps even be rendered in plain text to achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio.

I wouldnt say I cant live without it , but it saves me a few seconds here and there and its a great tool!

I've been using autojump, called with 'j'. Any pros of zoxide over that? https://packages.debian.org/sid/autojump

I tried zoxide, but at the end settled for using fzf to quickly find and enter directories:

  qcd () {
   local d
   dirs=$(fd -t d -t l --ignore-file ~/.gitignore . $@)
   d="$(echo ${dirs} | fzf +m --height=50%)"  && cd "${d}"
  }
  
  alias hd="qcd ${HOME}"

I think this is awesome tool, but somehow using fish shell does most of what I need and rarely I reach for it. This is not a critique of Zoxide, but just the fact that this is not as big of a problem once it was.

I barely use pushd/popd, for me this would be overkill, and I dislike the side effects. I mostly use my history, so same command needs to reliably do same thing. Workaround for cd-ing:

cd ~/foo; $COMMAND ; #optional cd ~ here

My history is full of this

I tried using z for a while but I got mad every time I typoed, failed a tab-complete, and ended up in some random directory halfway across my disk instead of doing nothing.

Rust people trying to replace stuff that already works...

Seems like a bit fancier "cd -" to me.

This has me lamenting just how fiddly it really is to implement a standalone "cd" that isn't a builtin.

I am certainly there are a whole host of security reasons not to, but it sure would be handy if a parent process could easily just read the final state of all environmental variables of a child process and possibly integrate them back into its own.

Shells could just have a syntax for accepting sub process environmental variables. I'd propose something easy like starting a line with = absorbing all set environmental variables.

We could build a custom cd tool, "custom-cd-bin" in this example and all that would need to do is change the PWD variable.

  $ =custom-cd-bin ./foo

Maybe this will be something for my dream shell I'm never going to actually get around to building. It would take something gross like wrapping setenv though

Please replace CD with cd in the title, it's misleading.

there are CLI tools that are combining most of these package in one go, like Yazi, that are gaining popularity in the TUI community.

Interesting to read the different threads, it sounds like most of the shortcomings of this tool can be somehow "configured away", but at that point, just configure your terminal by adding suggestions, plugins, etc, then you'll have all what you need for every command, not just CD.

Zoxide is amazing and I can't live without it since I switched to it.

Ctrl+r in zsh already gives you fuzzy search. In the rare case I have to go to a long path that I can't remember I use that, but for most cases, cd <tab> [...] <tab> <enter> suffices if I am feeling really lazy