Re: .zsh_history

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2023-04-14 21:49, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> *But* that doesn't mean everyone understands all the configurations. 


That's for sure.  Like anything that grew by accretion, not design, as 
new features were tacked on, the documentation became more and more 
incoherent.  I don't even attempt to understand completion now, I threw 
myself at it a couple of times and failed miserably.  complete completer 
completion completed completable ... only Satan really understands it.

> So I think a more accurate statement would be that the configuration
> is unidirectional: everyone understands their own configuration,
> because they had an idea of what made sense, looked for a way to
> achieve it, and found it. But other people have other ideas, and their
> configuration isn't necessarily understood by others.

Yup.  Write-only configuration.

I'm 100% certain you can do that, but not with history expansion, you'll
> need to use zle for that.
I'd sure like to know how!  Back in the day nobody seemed to know how to 
do it, not even Bart.  I came pretty close using 'noglob' and my 
functions work OK, but it would be vastly simpler if I could recover 
unexpanded command tails in some direct way.   As it is I run the 
function as an alias preceded by 'noglob' then save the literal text of 
the command tail as needed then 'eval' it.  Quite dumb, but it's the 
only way that I've found.
> So you can write zle widgets to do anything you want to do with the
> current line, but that's significantly different from history
> substitution (e.g. !!0).

Never played with that.  Don't know anything about it.  All I want is to 
be able to recover a command tail *exactly* as it was typed.

my_function ()

{

grab_tail # writes tail to 'my_tail'.

echo "my tail, exactly as typed, is: $my_tail"

}

$ my_function $path $(eval 'ls *') one two three ! < > ``.."" &>^!

my tail, exactly as typed, is: $path $(eval 'ls *') one two three ! < > 
``.."" &>^!

... no simple thing, since it is the nature of shells to expand and 
process command lines, not save them as typed.  But history does almost 
do it.



>
> Cheers.
>