Zoxide: A Better CD Command

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception & role among CLI tools

  • Many commenters call zoxide “work‑changing” and “can’t live without it,” using it dozens of times per day.
  • Frequently mentioned alongside fzf, ripgrep, fd, eza/lsd, bat, starship, Atuin, and fish as part of a modern “killer CLI stack.”
  • Several people alias z or even cd to zoxide so it feels transparent until they land on a system without it.

Relation to z, autojump, and similar tools

  • Zoxide is widely seen as a Rust reimplementation of earlier tools like z and autojump, mainly differing in speed and implementation language.
  • Some think the various tools are functionally similar; choice is about performance, installation ease, and shell support.
  • The original autojump author now recommends zoxide and notes autojump is effectively unmaintained; zoxide can import autojump data.

Usage patterns, integrations, and tricks

  • Common workflows:
    • z for direct jumps, zi (interactive picker) when there are ambiguous matches.
    • Combining zoxide query with fzf for an interactive, ranked list of visited dirs.
    • Git‑aware wrappers (e.g., worktree‑aware scripts) and --basedir aliases scoped to a git repo root.
  • Some shells (fish, zsh with plugins) plus tools like Atuin or McFly give history‑ and context‑aware navigation that partially overlaps zoxide.

Fuzzy matching: benefits and complaints

  • Fans like “frecency” (frequency + recency) and jumping by partial names (e.g., z foo bar for nested paths).
  • Critics dislike non‑deterministic behavior: “lottery ticket” feeling, accidentally jumping to wrong dirs (e.g., thing vs thing-api, many .../src).
  • Mitigations mentioned: manual score adjustment, multi‑keyword queries, zi interactive mode, or using tab‑completion on z queries.

Alternative philosophies and skepticism

  • Some prefer:
    • Native shell features (CDPATH, dirs/pushd/popd, recursive fzf on find, cd‑history keybindings).
    • Simple aliases or variables as “bookmarks,” or scripts like mkdircd.
  • A few see it as overkill or “an improved hammer that didn’t need improvement,” emphasize knowing their directory tree, or fear accidental destructive ops in wrong dirs.

Meta: sponsorship and aesthetics

  • Noted trend of GitHub READMEs leading with sponsor ads (e.g., Warp) and heavy emojis; some dislike this and prefer man‑page‑style minimalism, others accept it as funding for good tools.