z and z: A tale of two z’s

Remember my little rant from a few weeks ago, the one about single-character application names? If you don’t it’s just as well. I usually regret my rants. That one was no exception.

The point comes through though, since I have two z’s to report — this one and this one.

 

The z on the left is an intuitive compression-decompression tool. By all rights it should sense whether a file should be compressed or decompressed, and come up with the right results. If you remember atool or dtrx or unp, think of it as one of those, with enough smarts to do the opposite, if need be.

I did run into a few problems with z — the z on the left, that is. Compression seemed to sputter in the Arch version, while it looked for something called compress at /usr/bin/. It wasn’t finding it, and so half of what it could do, it couldn’t.

The z on the right is another fast directory switching tool. It’s by the same author as j and j2, and seems to follow the same pattern.

If you place the z.sh script somewhere in your $PATH, and change the $_Z_CMD variable to just “z”, then you should start building a database of recently visited directories. From there you can jump straight to a particular one by prefixing it — or part of it — with just “z”.

In theory, of course, and there is more to it than just that. It works acceptably well, although personally I’m not much of a fan of fast-directory-switcher-gizmos, and so a lot of it is probably lost on me.

So there are the two z’s, and I’d like to just take one last second to remind everyone out there who is working on building The Next Great Killer App, The Program That Will Change Life As We Know It, The Application That Consumed The Entire Universe In One Slobbery Gulp, to please — please — think rationally for just the briefest moment, and give your program a name that’s longer than just one stupid letter. 😡