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Contextual Abbreviations for ZSH

Contextual abbreviations (cabbrevs) are like aliases that are only valid in certain contexts and expand automatically. For example, the cabbrev docker,a,attach means "Expand a to attach, but only when the current command line starts with docker". With this cabbrev, when you type docker a<SPACE>, it will automatically expand to docker attach, but echo a<SPACE> is still just echo a .

The following demo shows just how many keystrokes you can save. docker a expands to docker attach. Pressing space again shows the available cabbrevs, entering n d results in docker attach --no-stdin --detach-keys.

Demo of contextual abbreviations for docker attach

Another example: git ce q j 4 be expands to git clone --quiet --jobs 4 --bare.

This repo also contains a script for generating cabbrevs from --help text.

Installation

Manual

Clone the repo somewhere:

git clone https://github.com/langston-barrett/zsh-contextual-abbrevs ~/somewhere

Then add this line to your ~/.zshrc:

source ~/somewhere/src/contextual-abbrevs.zsh

With a Plugin Manager

TODO(#1): PRs welcome :-)

Configuration

cabbrevs are defined in ZSH arrays named _ABBREVS, like so:

_ABBREVS=(
"git restore,s,--source"
"git restore,p,--patch"
"git restore,W,--worktree"
)

(This example was extracted from git.zsh.) Each file in ./src/abbrevs contains one such array. These arrays must be sorted in decreasing prefix length.

You can generate abbreviations from help text using extract-abbrevs.py, e.g.

./scripts/extract-abbrevs.py git

Comparison to Other Tools

Contextual abbreviations work like globalias or zsh-abbr, except that they are contextual - a expands differently when it comes after *git vs. docker.