Zsh-Edit

Zsh-Edit is a set of powerful extensions to the Zsh command line editor.

Requirements

• Recommended: Zsh 5.7.1 or newer
• Minimum: Zsh 5.4.2

bind Command

# Bind shell commands directly to keyboard shortcuts.
# What's more, when using these, your current command line will be left intact.
bind \
    '^[c' 'code .' \
    '^[o' 'open .' \
    '^[l' 'git log' \
    '^[s' 'git status -Mu --show-stash'

# List duplicate keybindings in the main keymap or another one:
bind -d
bind -dM viins

# List unused keybindings in the main keymap or another one:
bind -u
bind -uM emacs

# Look up the names of key codes listed by `bind` and `bindkey`:
% bind -n '^[[5~' '^[^[OA'
PreviousPage  Alt-UpArrow

Key Bindings

Zsh-Edit adds the following keyboard shortcuts to keymaps main and emacs (which are usually the same).

• You can customize these with Zsh's bindkey command, after sourcing Zsh-Edit.
• Not all terminals support all key bindings.

Clipboard Viewer

Whenever you use yank (^Y in emacs), vi-put-after (p in vicmd) or vi-put-after (P in vicmd) to paste a kill into the command line, Zsh-Edit will list the contents of your kill ring (including the cut buffer) below your command line. In addition, Zsh-Edit eliminates all duplicate kills from your kill ring. Thus, each entry listed is guaranteed to be unique.

Furthermore, after pasting, when you use yank-pop (^[y in emacs), Zsh-Edit will show you which kill is currently selected, making it easier to cycle to the right one. To view your clipboard at any time – without modifying your command line – just press yank-pop by itself.

Finally, Zsh-Edit adds a new widget reverse-yank-pop, which lets you cycle in the opposite direction. It is bound to ^[Y in the main keymap.

Subword Movement

Zsh's widgets forward-word, backward-word, kill-word and backward-kill-word fail to stop on many of the positions that we humans see as word boundaries:

# Zsh default word boundaries 😕

# With default WORDCHARS='*?_-.[]~=/&;!#$%^(){}<>'
#     > >     >  >          >   >      >     >                        >
% dscl . -read ~/ UserShell; git config --get status.showUntrackedFiles
# <    < <     <  <          <   <      <     <
# Skips/deletes _way_ too much.

# With WORDCHARS=''
#        >       >          >   >        >   >      >                 >
% dscl . -read ~/ UserShell; git config --get status.showUntrackedFiles
# <       <       <          <   <        <   <      <
# A bit better, but skips _all_ punctuation clusters & doesn't find SubWords.

Zsh-Edit adds new widgets with better parsing rules that can find all the word boundaries that matter to us as humans:

# Word boundaries with Zsh-Edit 🤗

# With default WORDCHARS='*?_-.[]~=/&;!#$%^(){}<>'
#    > >     >  >    >    > >  >      >     >      >    >        >    >
% dscl . -read ~/ UserShell; git config --get status.showUntrackedFiles
# <    < <     <  <   <    < <   <      <     <     <    <        <

# With WORDCHARS=''
#    > > >   >  >    >    > >  >      >  >  >      >    >        >    >
% dscl . -read ~/ UserShell; git config --get status.showUntrackedFiles
# <   < < <    <  <   <    < <   <      < <   <      <   <        <

If you don't want to change your $WORDCHARS globally, you can instead use

zstyle ':edit:*' word-chars '*?\'

This will change $WORDCHARS only for the widgets provided by zsh-edit.

Author

© 2020-2021 Marlon Richert

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.