Re: [Gnu-arch-users] another poke at the special chars

[Adam Spiers]

Bruce Stephens (address@hidden) wrote:
> Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Samuel Tardieu <address@hidden> writes:
> >> More seriously, it would be great if zsh replaced =foo by `which foo`
> >> only if no =foo exists in the current directory.
> >
> > I suspect they would resist such a change because it can lead to
> > very surprising results.
> >
> > But really, this is just a severely broken feature of zsh, they
> > should just follow Tom's advice and use a safer syntax.
> 
> "Severely broken"?  I've been using zsh (with this feature) for about
> a decade, I think, and Arch is the first thing that's caused me to
> notice a problem.  And even now, it just involves typing "./" before
> whatever it is.  Or, for that matter, just quoting like this
> '{arch}/=tagging-method' (default completion works within quotes in
> zsh, so I don't need to type all that), since the braces are also
> special characters.

I also object to this "severely broken" label; as I have stated before
on this list it is both optional and remarkably useful, so useful in
fact that I would find a workaround for the arch usage rather than
turn it off.  Nor does it apply to foo/=bar but only when the word
starts with '='.  So yes, it's as easy as the two extra keystrokes for
a "./".

> Seriously, it's just no big deal, IMHO.  I seem to remember someone
> sending out a workaround for zsh; I seem not to have kept it, however,
> so either I'm misremembering or I just didn't feel it to be important.

You can disable it with:

  unsetopt equals

All this desperately needs to be added to the FAQ.  IIRC, last I heard
(which was admittedly a while ago), people were having problems
getting their Twiki accounts fixed, me included.  Is that still the
case?