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I would like to use the expansion mv 'foo bar' !#:1:s^\ ^-^ to produce the command mv 'foo bar' 'foo-bar'. However when I press the space bar, zsh assumes I've finished typing the expansion, leaving me with mv 'foo bar' !#:1:s^\ which yields mv 'foo bar' 'foobar'.

I can circumvent this behavior by typing mv 'foo bar' !#:1:s^\^-^ and then backtracking with the arrow keys to obtain mv 'foo bar' !#:1:s^\ ^-^, but that defeats the purpose.

How can I just turn off the expand-on-spacebar behavior? I suppose my desired behavior is to leave the command un-expanded until I press Enter. I didn't find anything on this in the manpage for zshexpn.

Edit: I've found that I can type mv 'foo bar' !{#:1:s^\ ^-^}, which holds off the expansion until the } is typed. But the question of how to prevent the expand-on-spacebar behavior stands.

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3

It seems you have bound the space key to magic-space, because the introduction to zsh explains:

If you bind space to magic-space, then csh-style history expansion is done on the line whenever you press the space bar.

So, either remove the line

bindkey " " magic-space

from your config. Or (if you are using some pre-defined config files like d'oh-my-zsh) make sure that the following command is executed after all other key bindings:

bindkey " " self-insert
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    I use Prezto. It turns out this was set in the "editor" module, in line 271 of the file .zprezto/modules/editor/init.zsh. I created a new "personal" branch by doing cd ~/.zprezto && git checkout -b personal. I commented out the line and then git commit`-ed the change, so the original Prezto configuration stays untouched. – shadowtalker Jun 10 '15 at 19:53
  • Also, running bindkey with no arguments dumps the list of bound keys to stdout. – shadowtalker Jun 10 '15 at 22:16

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