Treat prefix flags as invisible

[henrebotha]

I enjoy wa k gp → watch kubectl get pods. Recently, I've changed wa → watch -c (instead of watch), and now my old watch prefix doesn't work.

I can see this sort of thing being a bit of a pattern. I feel like it would be neat if (optionally) zsh-abbr could be told to ignore strings starting with - for the purposes of checking for prefixes.

ABBR_REGULAR_ABBREVIATION_SCALAR_PREFIXES=('watch ')
wa[space] # expands to `watch -c `
wa k gp[space] # expands to `watch -c kubectl get pods`, despite `watch -c ` not being a defined prefix
watch k gp[space] # expands to `watch kubectl get pods`

[olets]

I'm almost following 😀 Is the code block what you want and can't currently have, or an example of the current problem?

What about adding a glob prefix

'-? '

(If that's the right glob for "any number of non-whitespace characters prefixed by -". Haven't tested, and I don't write enough zsh globs to have really learned the syntax.)

[henrebotha]

Haha, let me try again.

The code block is what I want, but can't have.

• I have defined watch as a prefix, so that non-global abbreviations do indeed expand after watch (e.g. if k is a non-global abbreviation for kubectl, then watch k expands to watch kubectl).
• Sometimes when I use watch, I would like to do watch -c instead of just plain watch.
• When I do this, I no longer get non-global abbreviations expanding after watch -c, because I haven't defined a prefix watch -c, only watch itself.
• Thus, what I want (but this currently doesn't exist) is some way to indicate to zsh-abbr that, even though I've only defined watch as a prefix, it should understand that watch -c is "equivalent" to watch for the purposes of determining whether the input that follows it should be treated as an abbreviation to expand.

[henrebotha]

But let me see what happens with a globby prefix.

[henrebotha]

You're totally right, I didn't realise I could basically do this with glob prefixes! '-* ' (hyphen followed by anything followed by space) seems to do the job.