Effecient Directory Navigation

I’m always looking for ways to improve my workflow. I realized recently that I spend a decent amount of time each day navigating directories on my hard drive. I spent some time looking at ways to cut down on the repetition and landed on the following setup.

We’re going to install a few tools.

brew install fd fzf zoxide

• fd is a program for finding entries in your filesystem. It’s kind of like find but more ergonomic.
• fzf is a command-line fuzzy finder. It allows interactive filtering of pretty much any kind of list.
• zoxide is an alternative to the cd command that remembers directories you visit frequently and allows you to quickly navigate to them.

Once those were installed, I added this near the bottom of my .zshrc:

# .zshrc
eval "$(zoxide init --no-cmd zsh)"

Zoxide has two functions, one that works kind of like the built in cd except it also adds the directory to zoxide’s database. And another that brings up an interactive fuzzy finder of the database of recent directories. These are mapped to z and zi by default. By passing the --no-cmd argument, we’re telling zoxide not to define the z and zi commands because we’re going to customize the behavior a little.

# .zshrc
j() { __zoxide_z "$(fd -t d | fzf)" }
ji() { __zoxide_zi "$@" }

Here j uses fd to find all directories recursively, and piping that into fzf gives us an interactive prompt where we can fuzzy-find the directory we want. Passing that into __zoxide_z changes the current directory and adds it to zoxide’s database so we can access it later using ji.

Now we can type ji to interactively fuzzy find a recent directory and quickly change into it. Or, if we’re looking for a new directory not yet in the database, we can run j to fuzzy find it recursively on the file system. Nice!