Partial match high priority nested path over exact direct descendent (edge-case)

[qgates]

In ~ I have 2 folders:

~/go
~/dev/srv/api-go

The latter is in z's db with a high priority (80+).

• If I type z go from anywhere I end up in ~/dev/srv/api-go (wanted behaviour)
• But when I type z go from ~ it takes me to ~/go (unwanted behaviour)

Can this be fixed without excluding ~/go entirely? So I could still type z ./go or z ~/go to get there, but in all other cases z go matches ~/dev/srv/api-go.

I'll admit this is an edge case but it's been chafing with me lately. Perhaps a negative score in zoxide edit would indicate such directories?

Apologies in advance if I've missed anything obvious 😉

[ajeetdsouza]

z behaves first like a cd command, and then like a "jump" command. This is so that you don't have to build muscle memory for two commands (should I cd into this directory, or use z?)

The only way to solve this particular case is to use a query that will not match a local directory. Here's some alternatives:

• z api
• z / go
• z a go

[qgates]

Thanks for your response. I am aware of the workarounds, but the example I gave is one of many. The issue - for me at least - is that although z is designed to replace cd, it isn't cd on account of its additional fuzzy matching db capability.

z can fuzzy match or exact match, but the behaviour is dependent upon which directory a user is already in. That's confusing for the user: will z go change to an immediate subdirectory called go or will it fuzzy match from its database?

What I'm suggesting is to make that semantically clear, or to provide that as an option. It makes more sense to me at least. Operands resulting in a physical pathspec behave like cd and in all other cases fuzzy matching from the database.

[ajeetdsouza]

It's easy enough to implement - zoxide is designed with scriptability in mind. What you're asking for can be achieved with a simple one line function:

function z() { cd "$(zoxide query -- "$@")" }

[qgates]

Wasn't aware of that - thanks. However, that's not quite what I'm looking for. The above only works with parameters that match entries in the db, and doesn't work in situations where I want to do a straight cd with a pathspec eg:

z ./go or z /home/user/go

Sorry to trouble you further, but is it straightforward to achieve that? So if I'm in ~ and I type z go it matches from the db, but only does a cd when a pathspec is provided ie. z ./go?

Appreciate for your help 🙂

[ajeetdsouza]

As far as Linux is concerned, cd foo is identical to cd ./foo. Both are relative paths.

You could certainly write a custom script that only tries to manually cd if the directory contains a / in it, and falls back to zoxide otherwise - should solve your problem.