Uses
The zipper is often used where there is some concept of 'focus' or of moving around in some set of data, since its semantics reflect that of moving around but in a functional non-destructive manner.
The zipper has been used in
- Xmonad, to manage focus and placement of windows
- Huet's papers cover a structural editor based on zippers and a theorem prover
- A filesystem (ZipperFS) written in Haskell offering "...transactional semantics; undo of any file and directory operation; snapshots; statically guaranteed the strongest, repeatable read, isolation mode for clients; pervasive copy-on-write for files and directories; built-in traversal facility; and just the right behavior for cyclic directory references."
- Clojure has extensive support for zippers.
Read more about this topic: Zipper (data Structure)