Awesome, and thanks for the quick response! I was using a mix of bindings
from the emacs and vi modes, and I'd ended up with the emacs version of
Ctrl-W without realizing they were different. I ended up using "bindkey
'^W' vi-backward-kill-word".

-- Jack


On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Matt Garriott <matt.garriott@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Jack,
>
> If you use zsh's vi edit mode (instead of emacs mode) you will get this
> behavior by default.
>
> You can set your shell to use vi mode with this command.
>   bindkey -v
>
> This will set your shell's line editing mode to vi-style.
>
> You can get more info with:
>   man zshzle
>
> -Matt
>
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 02:20:57PM -0700, Jack O'Connor wrote:
> > Zsh likes to nuke my pipes when I delete backwards. For example, if I
> have
> > the line...
> >
> > echo a | grep
> >
> > ...and I press Ctrl-W twice, then what I'd like to have (and what vim and
> > bash give me) is...
> >
> > echo a
> >
> > But zsh doesn't seem to count the pipe as a word, and the second Ctrl-W
> > plows through it and deletes the "a". Is there any way to configure zsh
> to
> > get vim's behavior? And related, is there a way to delete backwards to
> the
> > next slash in a path, as Ctrl-W does in vim, rather than deleting the
> whole
> > path? Thanks very much.
> >
> > -- Jack O'Connor
>