Storage and manual editing

User abbreviations live in a plain text file which you can edit directly, share, keep in version control, etc.

The path to the file is stored in the ABBR_USER_ABBREVIATIONS_FILE configuration variable. Read Configuration variables for details.

Abbreviations in this file are loaded when each new session is opened; non-abbr commands will be ignored and then excised from the file.

zsh-abbr automatically keeps the user abbreviations storage file alphabetized, with all global user abbreviations before the first regular user abbreviation.

Every time an abbr command is run, the session's updates its user abbreviations with the latest from the user abbreviations file. This should add no appreciable time, but you prefer it can be turned off by setting ABBR_AUTOLOAD=0.

To refresh the user abbreviations from the user abbreviation, run abbr load (or any other abbr command).