Expanding aliases in zsh

code taken from here with slight modifications.

I wanted to make some of my zsh aliases behave like vim abbreviations: Namely, as soon as you press space, the alias is expanded and you see the expanded command before executing it. Since I have a large number of clunky aliases, I didn't want all aliases to be expanded by default.

Consequently, I came up with the following (based on something I first saw here).

typeset -a ealiases
ealiases=()

function permealias () 
{ 
  alias "$*";
  echo ealias "$*" >> ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/zsh-ealiases.zsh
}
function ealias()
{
  alias $1
  ealiases+=(${1%%\=*})
}

function expand-ealias()
{
if [[ $LBUFFER =~ "(^|[;|&])\s*(${(j:|:)ealiases})\$" ]]; then
    zle _expand_alias
    zle expand-word
fi
zle magic-space
}

zle -N expand-ealias

bindkey -M viins ' '    expand-ealias
bindkey -M emacs ' '    expand-ealias
bindkey -M viins '^ '   magic-space     # control-space to bypass completion
bindkey -M emacs '^ '   magic-space
bindkey -M isearch ' '  magic-space # normal space during searches

To define an expandable alias use ealias. The syntax of ealias is the same as that of alias For example, I use

ealias gc='git commit'
ealias gp='git push'
ealias dsp='docker service ps'
ealias h='history | grep'

Create a separate file for your ealiases and place it in the following directory with the following name:

$ touch ${HOME}/.oh-my-zsh/custom/zsh-ealiases.zsh

and paste the above aliases or create your own To add an ealias from the command line you can use the permealias function:

$ permealias "dslogs='docker service logs -f --tail=100'"

The quotes order is important when entering an expandable alias because with more than one word because of the shell different evaluation of single quote and double quotes. Further reading

Now typing gc in a position where zsh expands a command will appear like you typed git commit.

Installation

Your preferred zsh plugin manager, or just clone into ${HOME}/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/ and then add it as the last plugin in the list of oh-my-zsh plugins

plugins=(zsh-nvm git docker brew node npm osx web-search zsh-syntax-highlighting ssh-agent expand-ealias)

License

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.