Zaw Plugin

04 Feb 2015 . dotfiles . Comments

What is zaw

Zaw is zsh plugin which acts like a widget to bring together a wealth of resources making it easier to find what you need in you shell.

How do I use it

I use zaw mainly to replace the reverise lookup functionality of zsh, why? Because zaw allows wildcard and incomplete searching of commands as well as a nice scrollable list.

I also like it because I can hit tab and get an option to edit the histroy command in the buffer before executing it.

Installation

My installation is available off my dotfiles repo, but if want to install this manually - to how I run it, follow these steps:

Im making an assumption you’re using the oh-my-zsh framework.

Step 1: Clone the repo

git clone git://github.com/zsh-users/zaw.git

Step 2: Update zaw plugin

We want to update the zaw plugin code to use ^R key binding, and to limit the output to 10 lines, do to this open zaw.plugin.zsh file in the root of the zaw repo and update the following lines:

bindkey '^R' zaw-history
bindkey '^Z' zaw

#zstyle ':filter-select:highlight' matched fg=green
zstyle ':filter-select' max-lines 15
zstyle ':filter-select' rotate-list yes
zstyle ':filter-select' case-insensitive yes
zstyle ':filter-select' extended-search yes # see https://github.com/zsh-users/zaw for explanation

Step 3: Setup zshrc opts

Here we want to disable search dups in our history as zaw by default loads your entire history file, which can make it bloated, slow and hard to get what you want fast.

Add the following options to your ~/.zshrc file:

setopt APPEND_HISTORY
setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY
setopt HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
setopt NO_HIST_BEEP
setopt SHARE_HISTORY
setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS
setopt HIST_IGNORE_DUPS

Step 4: Reload zsh

Lastly reload your zsh shell by using source ~/.zshrc or loading a new terminal window.