Intro to bash scripting - Terminal Tooling

Zoxide is a small and focused command line tool that supercharges the cd command. Its goal is to reduce repetitively typing out paths to directories you've already visited.

You can use it as a drop in replacement for cd and use it exactly how you would use cd. Once installed, every time you change to a directory with z (the name of the binary zoxide installs into your path) it remembers the path for later. Later, it uses this history to parse z paths using arbitrary fragments of that path.

Say you have a project you often work on in a deeply nested folder structure. Normally you might cd to it like so:

cd ~/path/to/a/very/nested/directory/with/my/project_a

If instead you ran:

z ~/path/to/a/very/nested/directory/with/my/project_a

Zoxide would remember this path. The next time you wanted to get to this path, you could just type any portion of it and Zoxide would find the best match of the directories you've changed to.

For example:

z proj

Would send you back to the same directory.

If you had multiple directories that might match on just that string, you can add multiple parameters to refine your search:

z nest proj

Using the z command aims to be a deterministic solution to changing directories. This means if you give it any input, it will just pick the option it thinks most closely matches. Most of the time, zoxide is very smart and its pick is probably what you want. However, if you can only remember a very generic portion of the path, picking whichever path zoxide thought was best may not be what you want.

In this case, you can use a close sibling, zi which is just like z, but uses fzf to allow the user to select between the most likely candidates of your search.

That's all folks. Zoxide is great, intuative, and simple. Install it. Use it. Enjoy it.