New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: A shell-native cd-compatible directory jumper using power-law frecency

Show HN: A shell-native cd-compatible directory jumper using power-law frecency
7 by jghub | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I have used this tool privately since 2011 to manage directory jumping. While it is conceptually similar to tools like z or zoxide, the underlying ranking model is different. It uses a power-law convolution with the time series of cd actions to calculate a history-aware "frecency" metric instead of the standard heuristic counters and multipliers. This approach moves away from point-estimates for recency. Most tools look only at the timestamp of the last visit, which can allow a "one-off" burst of activity to clobber long-term habits. By convolving a configurable history window (typically the last 1,000+ events), the score balances consistent habits against recent flukes. On performance: Despite the O(N) complexity of calculating decay for 1,000+ events, query time is ~20-30ms (Real Time) in ksh/bash, which is well below the threshold of perceived lag. I intentionally chose a Logical Path (pwd -L) model. Preserving symlink names ensures that the "Name" remains the primary searchable key. Resolving to physical paths often strips away the very keyword the user intends to use for searching.