Re: zle insert problems

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Aug 2,  5:28pm, Pascal Wittmann wrote:
} 
} I'll take this solution but just to have a explicit no: There is no way
} doing this only via zle?

I'm going to disagree with PWS a little here (horrors!) and assert that
it's OK to use zle commands to emulate user interactions in the case
where you want to precisely mimic a command's behavior.  For example
it's much easier to do

    zle vi-backward-word

than it is to analyze $LBUFFER to figure out where that cursor motion
would have left you.  The whole set of widget actions isn't flushed to
the screen until the widget finishes or something like "zle -R" is
run, so it's not as if the user sees the cursor jumping about.

This is particularly true if you're working with multi-line buffers
or want to move up and down in the history.

Also you can mix zle actions with direct assignments to the various
control parameters.  So your original example could be written

    do-something() {
      CURSOR=0
      LBUFFER="something"
      zle end-of-line
    }

Thus, similarly,

    replace-pacman-command() {
      if [[ $LBUFFER = "pacman"* ]]; then
	 CURSOR=0
	 zle forward-word
	 zle delete-word
	 LBUFFER+="$*"
         zle end-of-line
      fi
    }

Another reason for using zle commands is that they properly maintain
the relative positions of $MARK and $CURSOR, which get lost when you
modify LBUFFER directly.  However, there isn't a zle command to insert
arbitrary characters.