ftblog

Ausnahmsweise mal in Englisch...

Have you ever been harassed by zsh, with the following question?

'zsh: correct 'foo' to '_foo' [nyae]? '

The auto-correction mechanism is (as opposed to the completion system), pretty
inflexible. In this case, zsh could not find the command 'foo'. But it found a
function called '_foo'. So, for the correction mechanism '_foo' is a sensible
correction.

For the user however, '_foo' is absolutely useless on the command line. It is
part of the completion system (function names starting with an underscore are
completion widgets per convention). Those functions, called from the command
line, will bail out, telling you something like:

_arguments:comparguments:303: can only be called from completion function

Completely useless.

This may have two reasons:
  a) You just installed 'foo' and you didn't call 'hash -r'.
  b) 'foo' is just not installed.

You could solve a) by forcing 'hash -r' every time you hit enter. b) on the
other hand isn't that simple. But doable, still. It requires changes to what
the default 'accept-line' zle-widget does.

If you have been to '#zsh' on freenode for a bit you may have noticed, that
every once in a while, questions about doing automated changed to the command
line buffer before calling 'accept-line' come up. The default answer to those
questions is to create a wrapper around the default 'accept-line' widget.

To solve these problems once and for all I created a generic wrapper for
'accept-line', that is configurable via 'zstyle'.

It can be found in my zsh configuration (in functions/accept-line).
Copy that file into your $fpath and do:

% autoload -U accept-line && accept-line

Now you get a warning if you want to execute a command, zsh does not know about
and for which a _completion exists. Hitting enter a second time will try that
execution anyway.

Forcing rehashing works, but has to be enabled via a style.
This wrapper is configured via styles. That means, you issue commands, that look
like:

zstyle 'context' style value

The context namespace, that we are using is 'acceptline'. That means, the actual
context for your commands look like: ':acceptline:blafoobar'.

Where 'blafoobar' is one of: default, normal, force, misc or empty.

  default:
    This is the value, the context is initialized with.
    The 'compwarnfmt' and 'rehash' styles are looked up in this context.

  normal:
    If the first word in the command line is either a command, alias, function,
    builtin or reserved word, you are in this context.

  force:
    This is the context, that is used if you hit enter again, after being warned
    about the existence of a _completion for the non-existing command you
    entered.

  empty:
    This is the context, you are in if the command line is empty or only
    consists of whitespace.

  misc:
    This context is in effect, if you entered something that does not match any
    of the above. (e.g.: variable assignments).

Available styles:

  nocompwarn:
    If you set this style to true, the warning about non existent commands,
    for which completions exist will not be issued.

  compwarnfmt:
    The message, that is displayed to warn about the _completion issue.
    (default: '%c will not execute and completion %f exists.')
    '%c' is replaced by the command name, '%f' by the completion's name.

  rehash:
    Defaults to 'false'.
    If this is set, we'll force rehashing, if appropriate.

  actions:
    This can be a list of wigdets to call in a given context.
    If you need a specific order for these to be called, name them accordingly.
    The default value is an empty list.

  default_action:
    The name of a widget, that is called after the widgets from 'actions'.
    By default, this will be '.accept-line'.

  call_default:
    If true in the current context, call the widget in the 'default_action'
    style. (The default is 'true' in all contexts.)

"Hear hear! - But, frankly: Huh!?"

So, if it's examples you want; examples you get.

If you are like me, and don't want the shell to do anything when you hit enter
on an empty command line, you can now just disable that:

% zstyle ':acceptline:empty' call_default false

Or maybe you want the screen to be cleared, if you hit enter on an empty line:

% zstyle ':acceptline:empty' default_action clear-screen

If the warning about completions for non existing command confuses you,
disable it:

% zstyle ':acceptline:*' nocompwarn true

Simple enough, I think.

The rehashing thing is turned off by default. Switching it on is straight
forward:

% zstyle ':acceptline:*' rehash true

If you never used styles before, you might wonder: 'Why not
:acceptline:default?' - Well, in this particular case: Because it's shorter. :-)
In general, though, contexts can be patterns not just fixed strings.

Now how to change that warning message?

% zstyle ":acceptline:*" compwarnfmt \
'The command %c will not execute.
A completion %f exists.
You got auto correction set to ON.
This may lead to unexpected results.

Hit enter again, to try execution anyway.'

Okay, one last example.
Say you got two widgets, that do magic to the command line. That could be
everything you would want to have. Like prepending 'aptitude' by 'sudo' if the
first argument to the program needs superuser access. And a widgets that does
some smart tricks for command lines that start with 'ssh'.

Imagine, that you want to make sure the ssh thing runs *before* the aptitude
widget. To achieve this name them something like this: 01_fixssh, 02_fixapt

Now do:

% zstyle ':acceptline:normal' actions 01_fixssh 02_fixapt

If you got multiple actions set and you want to stop processing in certain
situations you can do that by setting the $aldone parameter to something bigger
than zero before returning from your widget.

If you decide to use this wrapper yourself, feel free to do so. If you use grml,
don't bother, you'll get it automatically pretty soon. :-)

If you have suggestions, additions or found a bug, please go ahead and tell me.