Distance finds min cost not min number about levenshtein HOT 1 CLOSED

As you noted it optimizes for cost with different weights for the different edit operations. You can somewhat achieve what you want by multiplying the cost on your own in the following way:

from rapidfuzz.distance import Levenshtein
editops = Levenshtein.editops("Kustus Wolff", "Justus Wolff")
cost = 0
for editop in editops:
    if editop.tag == "replace":
        cost += 10
    elif editop.tag == "insert":
        cost += 2
    elif editop.tag == "delete":
        cost += 2

Note however that there is no guarantee for you to get the same result across different versions. The reason for this is that multiple sequences of edit operations can be optimal. An example for this is: Levenshtein.editops("ab", "ba"). Currently this returns an Insertion and a Deletion. However it could return two Substitutions as well.

from levenshtein.