Paul Goscicki

Here is my take on VI mode indicator in zsh’s prompt. This is useful only for people who use the vi mode (bindkey -v) in ZSH.

vim_ins_mode="%{$fg[cyan]%}[INS]%{$reset_color%}"
vim_cmd_mode="%{$fg[green]%}[CMD]%{$reset_color%}"
vim_mode=$vim_ins_mode

function zle-keymap-select {
  vim_mode="${${KEYMAP/vicmd/${vim_cmd_mode}}/(main|viins)/${vim_ins_mode}}"
  zle reset-prompt
}
zle -N zle-keymap-select

function zle-line-finish {
  vim_mode=$vim_ins_mode
}
zle -N zle-line-finish

And then it’s a matter of adding ${vim_mode} somewhere in your prompt. For example like this:

RPROMPT='${vim_mode}'

Other examples on the web use zle reset-prompt in the zle-line-init, which has a very nasty side effect of deleting last couple of lines on mode change (when going from ins to cmd mode) when using multi-line prompt. Using zle-line-finish works around that.

Unfortunately, it still suffers from one issue that so far I was unable to solve. When you press Ctrl+c while in cmd mode, the indicator will say you’re still in the cmd mode, while in fact you are in ins mode.

Perhaps someone will find a workaround for that as well?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2012 at 13:50 and is filed under linux, ubuntu, zsh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.