History

You can configure zsh-abbr to save abbreviations to your shell history.

There are two levers in the history system:

Save abbreviations to history

zsh-abbr can add expanded abbreviations to your shell history. Given this configuration ^[1]

# .zshrc

ABBR_EXPAND_PUSH_ABBREVIATION_TO_HISTORY=1

and these abbreviations

% abbr a=b
% abbr -g c=d

When you do any of

% a[Space]
% a[Enter]
% c[Space]
% c[Enter]
% e c[Space]
% e c[Enter]

the abbreviation you expanded (a or c) will be added to your shell history.

Save lines with abbreviations to history

When you hit enter^[2] to expand an abbreviation and run the command line, an abbreviation in a line that has content besides the abbreviation, you can save the full line with the unexpanded abbreviation to the shell history.

# .zshrc

ABBR_EXPAND_AND_ACCEPT_PUSH_ABBREVIATED_LINE_TO_HISTORY=1

and this abbreviation

% abbr -g c=d

When you do

% e c[Enter]

two entries will be added to your shell history: first e c and then e d.

Caution

This feature supports hist_ignore_space (learn more in the zsh History Options docs) to a degree: it follows the value of hist_ignore_space when the session is initialized, but does not pick up on changes made interactively to the option.

Do this

# .zshrc

setopt hist_ignore_space
ABBR_EXPAND_AND_ACCEPT_PUSH_ABBREVIATED_LINE_TO_HISTORY=1

abbr a=b
echo a[Enter] # `echo a` will saved to history (expected)
 echo a[Enter] # `echo a` will not be saved to history (expected)

Don't do this

# .zshrc

ABBR_EXPAND_AND_ACCEPT_PUSH_ABBREVIATED_LINE_TO_HISTORY=1

abbr a=b
setopt hist_ignore_space
echo a[Enter] # `echo a` will saved to history (expected)
 echo a[Enter] # ⚠️ `echo a` will be saved to history (unexpected) ⚠️

Save abbreviations and lines with abbreviations to history

The two can be combined. Given this configuration,

# .zshrc

ABBR_EXPAND_PUSH_ABBREVIATED_LINE_TO_HISTORY=1
ABBR_EXPAND_AND_ACCEPT_PUSH_ABBREVIATED_LINE_TO_HISTORY=1

and this abbreviation

% abbr -g c=d

When you do

% e c[Enter]

three entries will be added to your shell history: first c, then e c, and then e d.

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1. Learn more at Configuration variables. ↩︎

2. Learn more at Widgets and key bindings. ↩︎