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?
If they had left quoted the word makefile, GNUmakefile would have been the first result.