is it possible to disable history-words either globally, or for certain commands?

[vitaly]

[marlonrichert]

Yes, you can control this through the tag-order style:

zstyle ':completion:*' tag-order '! history-words' -

[vitaly]

This certainly works and disables it globally. but if I try to do it for ':completion:*:cd:*', for some reason it doesn't. is there a way to target cd specifically?

[marlonrichert]

No, that’s not possible. cd gets set as a context inside _complete only. _history doesn’t go into that kind of detail.

[marlonrichert]

FYI: With d7a0899, I've now disabled history word completion completely, as it can cause serious performance hits.