Author here! I’m aware of the FZF search syntaxes. They are very useful! I designed zf to be a small tool that worked a bit better for me by default without special syntaxes.
Have you considered submitting this idea as a patch for fzf (like with a flag to switch syntax)? fzf author seems fairly strict/holding back about what goes in and what not, but it seems worth an attempt: thing is fzf can do a lot, is pretty well architected, many features are really neat, and it seems less work to patch it than to start from scratch.
No I hadn't considered that. I wouldn't be against my "zf algorithm" being ported to other tools though. But when I first had the idea for zf I had just learned Zig and it seemed like the perfect way to practice with my new language.
Would that have been the case even if there was a directory along the path called “makefile”? Or would the paths with that directory get ranked higher because the matches string occurs earlier in the path?