Question

I want to read a string from a user (using read builtin or something similar), with all completions enabled for normal shell usage. In other words, I want ZSH to complete all commands but after pressing ENTER I don’t want ZSH to execute the command, but pass the string to my script. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

To read a line with edition and completion, call the vared builtin.

foo='default text'
vared foo

Completion will work as if you were in the value part of a parameter assignment (because that’s what vared does). If you want completion like a normal command line, I think you need to fiddle with _complete to make it forget about being inside vared.

zmodload zsh/parameter
autoload +X _complete
functions[_original_complete]=$functions[_complete]
_complete () {
  unset 'compstate[vared]'
  _original_complete "$@"
}
foo='default text'
vared foo