Widgets and key bindings

By default

• Space expands abbreviations
• CtrlSpace is a normal space
• Enter expands and accepts abbreviations

(In incremental search mode, Space is a normal space and CtrlSpace expands abbreviations.)

There are three available widgets:

Widget	Behavior	Default binding
abbr-expand	If following an abbreviation, expands it	Not bound
abbr-expand-and-accept	If following an abbreviation, expands it (with abbr-expand). Then accepts the line	Enter
abbr-expand-and-insert	If following an abbreviation, expands it (with abbr-expand). Then appends the binding	Space in normal mode, CtrlSpace in search mode

TIP

If the expansion cursor placement system is enabled, you can make abbr-expand-and-accept behave like abbr-expand on a per-abbreviation basis by appending the expansion cursor marker to the expansion. Learn more in Cursor placement.

abbr-expand-and-space was deprecated in v5.4.0 and dropped in v6.0.0. Use abbr-expand-and-insert instead.

zsh-abbr also binds CtrlSpace ("^ ") to magic-space and, in search mode, Space (-M isearch " ") to magic-space.

In the following example, additional bindings are added such that Ctrle expands abbreviations without adding a trailing space and Ctrla has the same behavior as Space.

# .zshrc

bindkey "^E" abbr-expand
bindkey "^A" abbr-expand-and-insert

To prevent the creation of the default bindings, set ABBR_DEFAULT_BINDINGS to 0 before initializing zsh-abbr. In the following example, CtrlSpace expands abbreviations and Space is not bound to any zsh-abbr widget.

# .zshrc

ABBR_DEFAULT_BINDINGS=0
bindkey "^ " abbr-expand-and-insert
# load zsh-abbr here

Alternative keymaps

By default, zsh-abbr is only enabled for the default keymap. To enable a widget for another keymap, run bindkey -M. For example, the following extends zsh-abbr's default behavior to the viins keymap:

# .zshrc

bindkey -M viins " " abbr-expand-and-insert
bindkey -M viins "^ " magic-space
bindkey -M viins "^M" abbr-expand-and-accept