DEV Community

March 19th, 2021: What did you learn this week?

Nick Taylor on March 19, 2021

It's that time of the week again. So wonderful devs, what did you learn this week? It could be programming tips, career advice etc. ![Yoda woopi...

Read full post

Heiker • Mar 19 '21 • Edited

Ooh. This one was interesting. This is a two part story.

1) So, zsh has a "vi-mode" built-in, and it turn out is not as useful in practice.

2) The bindkey command has an option -s that lets you map two key sequence.

Say I want to have a keymap, ctrl+x + s, to make zsh type sudo for me. This is how it goes.

bindkey -s '^xs' 'sudo'

The ^ thingy, means ctrl. That would work. But it can be better, because you can have the "special" sequence in the other side too. We can get fancy.

bindkey -s '^xs' '^asudo ^e'

^a means ctrl+a, so that would get you to the beginning of the line and type sudo for you. Then, ^e will get your cursor to the end of the line. I would say that works fine 95% of the time. The other 5%, is when the original position of the cursor wasn't the end of the line. Can we do better? Yes, remember the "vi-mode"? That works too.

Behold.

bindkey -s '^xs' '#^asudo ^x^vf#xi'

#: Its literally #, nothing special here.
^a: Go to the beginning of the line
sudo: You know it already.
^x^v: Enter vi-cmd mode. That is ctrl+x + ctrl+v. Not the most intuitive thing in the world.
f#: Remember, we are in "vi-mode." In here the character f is a command, a search command. What does it search? The next character we type. So, this will search for a # and get the cursor to that position.
x: Deletes the character under the cursor, which should be #.
i: Get us back to insert mode.

And there you have it. Now you can use ctrl+x + s to add sudo to a command you're currently writing, and it will take you back to the place you started (that is of course if you don't any extra # in your command already).

While on the subject of crazy keybindings I present these.

bindkey -s '^xf' '#^e | fzf^x^vF#xi'
bindkey -s '^xp' '#^e | less^x^vF#xi'

You can guess what they do.

EDIT: By the way, fish users already have something like these. I believe Alt+p will add | less to your command. Don't remember what others they have.