[Bug] unexpected behavior when ABBR_EXPANSION_CURSOR_MARKER set to caret

[olets]

Is there an existing issue for this?

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Update the issue title

• I have updated the title

Expected Behavior

Can use an arbitrary string as the ABBR_EXPANSION_CURSOR_MARKER.

Actual Behavior

If ABBR_EXPANSION_CURSOR_MARKER is ^, \^, '^', expansions without the cursor marker are doubled, with the cursor between them.

Steps To Reproduce

% ABBR_EXPANSION_CURSOR_MARKER='^'
% abbr a=b
% a[SPACE] # expands to `b[CURSOR]b`

Environment

zsh-abbr version 5.8.0
zsh 5.9 (arm-apple-darwin21.3.0)
OSTYPE darwin21.3.0

Installation method

Plugin manager

Installation method details

zcomet

Anything else?

• Originally reported in ! is escaped in v5, but wasn’t in v4 #84

[qadzek]

Instead of fixing this bug and supporting a caret as ABBR_LINE_CURSOR_MARKER (I have no idea how complicated that would be), maybe the documentation could just suggest a couple of characters that are known to work without issues?

I did change the default ABBR_LINE_CURSOR_MARKER from % to ^ because % would break abbreviations like abbr -g cdate="\$(date +'%F')". I have now changed it to @, and that seems to behave as expected.

By the way, after reading the documentation again, I learned about "context-dependent abbreviations" and "building command templates", which are both very cool features!

[olets]

maybe the documentation could just suggest a couple of characters that are known to work without issues

Good idea. Rather than doing that exactly, I've added callouts for a few limitations

• olets/zsh-abbr-v5-docs@619e4b6
• https://zsh-abbr.olets.dev/commands.html#add
• https://zsh-abbr.olets.dev/commands.html#erase
• https://zsh-abbr.olets.dev/usage.html#place-the-cursor
• https://zsh-abbr.olets.dev/advanced.html#configuration-variables

[qadzek]

For future reference: changing the special character to @ wasn't a wise decision, as it caused issues with commands like ssh user@hostname.
It seems that Unicode characters are accepted as well, so I'm now using U+2503 to avoid any further conflicts.

ABBR_EXPANSION_CURSOR_MARKER=┃
ABBR_LINE_CURSOR_MARKER=┃

[olets]

The upcoming v6.0.0 will fix this

[qadzek]

Nice. I'm looking forward to v6. I guess I'll stick to using that Unicode character though, as I'll never use it in a command, unlike the caret.

[olets]

Cool yeah I like the idea of using a Unicode character that I'd have to paste, that I can't type

Released in v6.0.0