zoxide

A cd command that learns your habits

Table of contents

• Installing zoxide
• Adding zoxide to your shell
  • zsh
  • fish

Introduction

zoxide is a new cd alternative inspired by z and z.lua. It keeps track of the directories you use most frequently, and uses a ranking algorithm to navigate to the best match.

On my system, compiled with the x86_64-unknown-linux-musl target, hyperfine reports that zoxide runs 10-20x faster than z.lua, which, in turn, runs 3x faster than z. This is pretty significant, since this command runs once at every shell prompt, and any slowdown there will result in an increased loading time for every prompt.

Examples

z foo       # cd to top directory matching foo
z foo bar   # cd to top directory matching foo and bar

z foo/      # can also cd into actual directories

zi foo      # cd with interactive selection using fzf

zq foo      # echo the best match, don't cd

za /foo     # add /foo to the database
zr /foo     # remove /foo from the database

Getting started

Installing zoxide

If you have Rust, this should be as simple as:

cargo install zoxide

Otherwise, try the install script:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide/master/install.sh | sh

If you want the interactive fuzzy selection feature, you will also need to install fzf.

Adding zoxide to your shell

zsh

If you use a package manager, installation should be as simple as adding ajeetdsouza/zoxide to your configuration. If you'd rather not use a package manager, simple include the following in your .zshrc:

_zoxide_precmd() {
    zoxide add
}

precmd_functions+=_zoxide_precmd

z() {
    if [ $# -ne 0 ]; then
        _Z_RESULT=$(zoxide query "$@")
        case $_Z_RESULT in
            "query: "*)
                cd "${_Z_RESULT:7}"
                ;;
            *)
                echo "${_Z_RESULT}"
                ;;
        esac
    fi
}

alias zi="z -i"

alias za="zoxide add"
alias zq="zoxide query"
alias zr="zoxide remove"

fish

Using fisher:

fisher add ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Configuration

Environment variables

• $_ZO_DATA: sets the location of the database (default: ~/.zo)
• $_ZO_MAXAGE: sets the maximum total rank after which entries start getting deleted