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.

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

You can install zsh-contextual-abbrevs with a zsh plugin manager, including those built into frameworks such as Oh-My-Zsh (OMZ) and prezto. Each has their own way of doing things. Read your package manager's documentation or the zsh plugin manager plugin installation procedures gist.

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.