zsh: stop backward-kill-word on directory delimiter

Question

In zsh, how can I set up the line editor such that backward-kill-word stops on a directory separator? Currently in my bash setup, if I type

cd ~/devel/sandbox

and then hit C-w point will be right after devel/. In my zsh setup, point would be after cd . I'd like to set up zsh so it behaves similarly to bash.

Faithfaithful

This might be a readline issue, I should add... – Faithfaithful

Answer 1

A quick google reveals:

Backward Kill

Or, perhaps a better fix:

Bash Style Backward Kill

Lilithe

For future readers: both of the other answers are strictly better and easier. – Ecto

link-only answers are discouraged as the link may die. Please include the relevant part in your answer – Illegal

Not a good answer and snarky as well "All you have to do is google the solution". I'll give this a down vote. – Oakland

@Emil, indeed, that's a better solution than the ones presented here. For posterity, I'll copy the gist of it here 1) Define a new function tcsh-backward-delete-word () { local WORDCHARS="${WORDCHARS:s#/#}"; zle backward-delete-word; } 2) Register it with ZSH zle -N tcsh-backward-delete-word 3) Add a keybinding bindkey '^W' tcsh-backward-delete-word. – Epistrophe

Answer 2

For recent versions of zsh, you can simply add:

autoload -U select-word-style
select-word-style bash

to your zshrc as described in the zsh manual (also man zshcontrib).

Mitchell

This is probably fairly specific, but if this doesn't work, it may be because of the zsh-syntax-highlighting plugin: github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting/issues/67. Make sure to source that plugin at the end of your zshrc. – Amadavat

This works, but only partially, i.e. jump a word forward and back still considers / to be a part of a word. – Landgrave

Ah, I fixed it, turns out for whatever reason the two lines should be at the very beginning of the file. – Landgrave

Note that for some reasons this work for the function backward-kill-word but not for backward-delete-word (the later should not copy the result in the yank ring) – Homothermal

Answer 3

Another option is to set WORDCHARS (non-alphanumeric chars treated as part of a word) to something that doesn't include /.

You can also tweak this if you'd prefer ^w to break on dot, underscore, etc. In ~/.zshrc I have:

WORDCHARS='*?_-.[]~=&;!#$%^(){}<>'

Gentilis

I can't find this explicitly mentioned in the manual but setting WORDCHARS to empty string (i.e: add the line WORDCHARS= to .zshrc) has the same effect. – Phillane

The empty string doesn't include / 😄 – Gentilis

I don’t want to hardcode the $WORDCHARS, so I used WORDCHARS=${WORDCHARS/\/} to remove slash from it. – Cryobiology

Just WORDCHARS= gives the best effect imo – Drumbeat

Building on Franklin's answer, ${WORDCHARS//[\/]} allows removing several characters by including them in the square brackets. – Contumelious

Answer 4

Here's what worked for me. unspecified word-style was required otherwise zsh didn't seem to respect the WORDCHARS.enter code here

WORDCHARS=' *?_-.[]~=&;!#$%^(){}<>/'
autoload -Uz select-word-style
select-word-style normal
zstyle ':zle:*' word-style unspecified

Here's more info on why this works.

Baribaric

This is the only solution on this page that worked for me thanks! - Macos ZSH – Esra