Zsh-z – fast directory navigation for Zsh

Zsh-z is a command-line directory navigation tool for Zsh.

It learns from the directories you visit and uses “frecency” — a combination of frequency and recency — to predict where you want to go from a short search string. Instead of repeatedly typing long paths, you can enter a fragment such as z src and let Zsh-z choose the highest-ranked matching location. The project is a native Zsh port of rupa/z, replacing its mixture of shell code and external utilities with a pure Zsh implementation. It can use the same database as z, which makes migration straightforward and allows the two tools to coexist when different shells are used.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Offers rank-only and recency-only matching modes.
• Restricts matches to subdirectories of the current directory when requested.
• Provides tab completion with results ordered by frecency.
• Runs database updates asynchronously so directory tracking does not hold up the prompt.
• Uses file locking to protect the directory database against concurrent writes from multiple shells.
• Stores the database with restrictive permissions to protect directory history on shared systems.
• Detects malformed database entries and avoids publishing incomplete writes.
• Lets users exclude selected directories from tracking.
• Supports removing individual directories or directory trees from the database.
• Can display the destination after changing directory.
• Supports custom database locations and a configurable directory-changing command.
• Avoids relying on external awk, sort, sed, date and similar commands for its normal operation.
• Handles paths containing spaces and a range of shell metacharacters.
• Provides configurable case-sensitive or case-insensitive matching.
• Can unload its alias, completion definitions and related shell state cleanly.

Website: github.com/agkozak/zsh-z
Support:
Developer: Alexandros Kozak
License: MIT License

Related Software

Read our verdict in the software roundup.

Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category. This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form.