zoxide

Jump to a directory by a fragment of its name, ranked by how often and how recently you go there.

What it does

zoxide tracks directories you visit and scores them by frequency and recency (“frecency”). z hextra jumps to the highest-scoring directory matching that fragment, from anywhere.

z lab          # jump to the best match
zi lab         # pick from matches interactively (needs fzf)
z -            # previous directory

Notes

Add eval "$(zoxide init zsh)" to ~/.zshrc. zoxide init zsh --cmd cd replaces cd outright, which is the configuration most people end up at. The database lives in ~/.local/share/zoxide and can be imported from z, autojump or fasd.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
autojump	Open source	The original of this idea, Python-based
z (rupa)	Open source	A single shell script, no binary to install
fasd	Open source	Tracks files as well as directories, now unmaintained
`CDPATH`	Built in	Built into the shell, and enough for a fixed set of project roots