# autojump-rs [![Crates.io version](https://img.shields.io/crates/v/autojump.svg)][cratesio] [![Crates.io downloads](https://img.shields.io/crates/dv/autojump.svg)][cratesio] [![Crates.io license](https://img.shields.io/crates/l/autojump.svg)](LICENSE) ![GitHub branch checks state](https://img.shields.io/github/checks-status/xen0n/autojump-rs/develop) A port of the wildly popular helper application [`autojump`][aj] to Rust. [aj]: https://github.com/wting/autojump [cratesio]: https://crates.io/crates/autojump ## License As this project is technically a fork, the license is the same as `autojump`, which is GPL, either version 3 or any later version. See [LICENSE](LICENSE) for details. ## Install We have [prebuilt binaries available][releases] for a while now, thanks to the [trust] project! The package is a drop-in replacement of `autojump`. Assuming `autojump` is already installed, or at least the shell script part of it has been properly set up, and you have in `$PATH` `~/.cargo/bin` before the system binary locations, all you have to do is to put [a binary of your choice architecture][releases] in your PATH, overriding the original `autojump` script. You may have to issue `hash -r` for the shell to forget previous location of `autojump`, if you don't want to re-exec your shell. (Manually cloning the repository and building is okay, of course.) [releases]: https://github.com/xen0n/autojump-rs/releases [trust]: https://github.com/japaric/trust ## Features Why do a port when the original version works? Primarily for two reasons: * The author is *really* tired of `autojump` breakage inside Python virtualenvs, and * Rust is simply *awesome* for CLI applications, with its performance and (code) slickness! Indeed, being written in a compiled language, **`autojump-rs` is very light on modern hardware**. As the program itself is very short-running, the overhead of setting up and tearing down a whole Python VM could be overwhelming, especially on less capable hardware. With `autojump-rs` this latency is greatly reduced. Typical running time is like this on the author's Core i7-2670QM laptop, with a directory database of 1014 entries: ``` $ time ./autojump/bin/autojump au /home/xenon/src/autojump-rs ./autojump/bin/autojump au 0.09s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 0.103 total $ time ./autojump-rs/target/release/autojump au /home/xenon/src/autojump-rs ./autojump-rs/target/release/autojump au 0.00s user 0.00s system 87% cpu 0.007 total ``` The time savings are more pronounced on less powerful hardware, where every cycle shaved off counts. The running time on a 1.4GHz Loongson 3A3000 is about 10ms, for example, which is very close to the x86 figures despite the clock frequency difference. And, of course, the program no longer interacts with Python in any way, so the virtualenv-related crashes are no more. Say goodbye to the dreaded `ImportError`'s *showing every `$PS1` in a virtualenv with the system-default Python*! ``` # bye and you won't be missed! Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python-exec/python2.7/autojump", line 43, in from autojump_data import dictify ImportError: No module named autojump_data ``` ## Compatibility All of the command line flags and arguments are now implemented, and behave exactly like the original. Being a drop-in replacement, all other shell features like tab completion should work too. (Except `jc` and `jco`; see below.) As for the text database, the on-disk format should be identical. (Actually there is a little difference in the representation of floats, but it doesn't matter.) However, as the author is developing and using this on Linux, other platforms may need a little more love, although all the libraries used are lovingly cross-platform. (Patches are welcome, of course!) The Windows batch files shipped with the original `autojump` has Python hard-coded into them, and obviously that won't work with `autojump-rs`. Use the batch files in the `windows` directory instead; just replacing the original files and putting `autojump.exe` along with them should work. (Thanks @tomv564 for the Windows testing!) That said, there're some IMO very minor deviations from the original Python implementation. These are: * Argument handling and help messages. Original `autojump` uses Python's `argparse` to parse its arguments. There is [a Rust port of it][rust-argparse], but it's nowhere as popular as the [`docopt.rs`][docopt.rs] library, as is shown in `crates.io` statistics and GitHub activities. So it's necessary to re-arrange the help messages at least, as the `docopt` family of argument parsers mandate a specific style for them. However this shouldn't be any problem, just that it's different. Again, who looks at the usage screen all the day? XD * Different algorithm chosen for fuzzy matching. The Python version uses the [`difflib.SequenceMatcher`][difflib] algorithm for its fuzzy matches. Since it's quite a bit of complexity, I chose to leverage the [`strsim`][strsim-rs] library instead. The [Jaro-Winkler distance][jaro] is computed between every filename and the last part of query needles respectively, and results are filtered based on that. * `jc` may jump outside current directory. Exact reason may be different filtering logic involved, but I'm not very sure about this one. The behavior is also observed on original `autojump`, but the frequency seems to be lower, and both implementations actually don't check if the target is below current directory. However I only use plain `j` mostly, so if you're heavily reliant on `jc` and its friends please open an issue! [rust-argparse]: https://github.com/tailhook/rust-argparse [docopt.rs]: https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rs [difflib]: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/difflib.html [strsim-rs]: https://github.com/dguo/strsim-rs [jaro]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance ## Future plans Now that platform support is mostly considered okay, next steps would be more refactoring and bug fixing. The `jc` behavior differences are observed on original `autojump` too, in that you could jump outside `$(pwd)`, but the actual directory jumped to is different; this needs further investigation. Hell I even want to write a `fasd` backend too, but I don't presently have *that* much free time. Anyway, contributions and bug reports are welcome!