Zoxide, A Smarter cd Command

I recently started using a tool called Zoxide from a friend’s recommendation and I must say, it’s pretty awesome. Zoxide is a smarter cd command that tracks your most used directories and allows you to jump to them with ease.

Installing Zoxide is a simple Brew command:

brew install zoxide

There is some shell setup required and since I use Fish, I had to add the following to my ~/.config/fish/config.fish file:

zoxide init fish | source

With that in place, we can now use the z command as an alternative to the cd command. The z command works exactly like cd but with some additional features. For example, you can use z - to jump to the last directory you were in, or z data to jump to the most used directory that contains the word data.

Here are some examples:

# jumps to ~/dev/data-science
z ~/dev/data-science
​
# jumps to ~/dev
z -
​
# jumps to ~/dev/data-science
z data

I’d highly recommend checking it out yourself, it’s a great tool to have in your toolbox.