A while ago I wrote a debugger for zsh called zshdb . See also https://repology.org/project/zshdb/versions . A feature that is missing in the debugger and that is available in the corresponding debugger for bash, bashdb, is the skip command. This command skips over the upcoming statement to be executed. The way this works in bashdb, is that if the debug hook returns with a nonzero value. The way BASH works is that if the trap DEBUG hook returns a nonzero value, BASH skips statement to be run. Thoughts about extening zsh so that it too will skip the upcoming statement if the zsh trap DEBUG hook return a non-zero value. Or more generally some means by which a DEBUG hook can indicate to zsh to skip the upcoming statement? Thanks.