Oh, excellent.  I knew there had to be an easy way to do this.

Thank you!

On 31 August 2017 at 15:33, Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 7:38 PM, Stephen Talley
> <stephentalley@nerdysoftware.com> wrote:
> > Is there any way for a command to pre-populate the the zle for the next
> > command?
> >
> > Suppose I have, for example, a zsh function "buildcmd" that produces a
> > command line (based on supplied arguments, say) that the user would then
> be
> > able to edit in the zle before hitting enter to accept the line and
> execute
> > it.  The flow would be:
> >
> >     % buildcmd --my --args<enter>
> >     % <output_from_buildcmd>
> >
> > I know I could just do:
> >
> >     % `buildcmd --my --args`<tab>
> >
> > to achieve the same thing, but it's a bit more tedious than I'd like.
> >
> > Ideally there'd be some hook (precmd?  accept-line?) that could check a
> > variable and pre-populate the zle:
> >
> >   buildcmd() {
> >     zle_prepopulate="some command to edit"
> >   }
> >
> >   precmd() {
> >     if [ -n "$zle_prepopulate" ]
> >     then
> >       zle -U "$zle_prepopulate"
> >     fi
> >   }
> >
> > ...but of course this doesn't quite work because the call to zle is not
> in
> > the context of a widget.
> >
> > Is there a way?
>
> You can use print -z to push any string you like on the zle editor
> stack, which effectively does what you want. (Ie, it is popped when
> the next command line is to be entered, which is immediately). There's
> no need to involve precmd or any hook, you can just call print -z
> directly from your function.
>
> --
> Mikael Magnusson
>