Is it possible to use different zsh menu selection behaviour for different commands?

Posted by kine on Super User See other posts from Super User or by kine
Published on 2011-10-19T22:22:37Z Indexed on 2012/12/14 23:09 UTC
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I'm using the menu select behaviour in zsh, which invokes a menu below the cursor where you can see the various possibilities. The .zshrc option i have set for this is

zstyle ':completion:*' menu select=2

By default, pressing Return to select a possibility in this menu only completes the word — it does not actually send the command. For example, I might get a menu like this

~ % cd de<TAB>
completing directory:
[Desktop/]  Development/

Pressing Return here will result in

~ % cd Desktop/

I then have to press Return a second time to actually send the command.

I can modify this behaviour to make it so that pressing Return both selects the completion and sends the command by doing this

bindkey -M menuselect '^M' .accept-line

However, there's a problem with this: sometimes I need to complete a file or directory without sending the command. For example, I might need to do ln -s Desktop Desktop2 — with this bindkey behaviour, trying to complete Desktop will result in ln -s Desktop/ being sent as the command, and obviously I don't want that.

I'm aware that just pressing space will let me get on with the command, but it's now a habit.
Given this, is there a way to make it so that only some commands let you press Return once (like cd), but all other commands require pressing it twice?

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